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Andrea Kaston Tange

Professor, English
Nineteenth-century British literature and culture, including: travel narratives, colonialism and empire, gender and class identities, visual and print culture, domesticity, childhood, Anglo-Jewish life and migrations.

Old Main 204

she/her/hers

Andrea Kaston Tange has been fascinated with Victorian fiction since, as a ten-year-old, she was duly impressed by Jane Eyre daring to take on her Aunt Reed–and winning. Her research has focused in various ways on questions of identity in the period: from the relationship between domestic architecture and middle-class-ness (Architectural Identities: Literature, Domesticity, and the Victorian Middle Classes, University of Toronto Press, 2010) to explorations of how the consolidation of the British empire required the active participation of children and impacted their lives (Children and Empire series, Routledge Press, 2012). Her current book-length project, Imagined Encounters: Palimpsests of Victorian Travel, examines how illustrating journalists, colonial settlers, and tourists, understood and represented themselves and others as they traveled the globe. Her most recently developed courses have focused on race in the Victorian period and include archival and digital projects that give students experience with many facets of research, writing, and editorial work.

In addition to her nineteenth-century research, she has become increasingly interested in broader questions of public understandings of the value of the humanities–including public intellectual work, digital humanities efforts, and debates about humanities careers, higher education funding, and what, exactly, the humanities are good for. To this end, she continues to amass a searchable collection of articles about the “State of the Humanities,” which informs her senior seminars and provides an openly-available resource on the topic. Her interest in intersections of digital work, pedagogy, and archival research have brought her to her current position as Director of Digital Liberal Arts at Macalester. Other national service includes serving on and chairing the Modern Language Association (MLA) Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities; having been on the Executive Committee, and President of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA); and serving currently as a member of the Advisory Board to the Midwest Victorian Studies Association.

She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a professor at Eastern Michigan University for fifteen years before joining the faculty at Macalester. She has served as President of the MMLA (2013-2014) and Editor of the Journal of Narrative Theory (2013-2015).

Areas of Study

  • Nineteenth-century British literature and culture
  • Travel narratives
  • Colonialism and empire
  • Gender and class identities
  • Visual and print culture, particularly the periodical press
  • Domesticity
  • Childhood
  • Anglo-Jewish life and migrations
  • Public intellectual work and the state of humanities study/career

Fall 2024 Courses

  • ENGL 262-01 Literature and the Natural World: Victorian Nature Writing

Selected Articles

“Maternity Betrayed: Circulating Images of English Motherhood in India, 1857-1858,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts (May 2013)

“Nineteenth-Century British Childhoods: Teaching at the Nexus of Children, Empire and Visual Culture,” Victorians Institute Journal (2011)

“Exploring Victorian Contexts: Using Wikis to Enrich Cultural Understanding,” Journal of Victorian Culture (April 2011)

“Redesigning Femininity: Miss Marjoribanks’s Drawing-Room of Opportunity,” Victorian Literature and Culture (2008)

“’Becoming a Victorian Reader’: The Serial Reading Process in the Modern Classroom,” Periodical Pedagogy, a special issue of VPR: Victorian Periodicals Review (Winter 2006)

“Constance Naden and the Erotics of Evolution: Mating the Woman of Letters with Man of Science,” Nineteenth-Century Literature (September 2006)

“Envisioning Domesticity, Locating Identity: Constructing the Victorian Middle Class through Images of Home” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, eds., Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004

Talks

“Who Cooked All That Soup? Gender Politics and 19th Century Jewish Philanthropy,” Ann Arbor Jewish Community Center. 2012.

“Turning Fans into Friends: Dickens, Twain and the Culture of Public Reading,” Eastern Michigan University. 2010.

Education

B.A. magna cum laude, University of Vermont

M.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison