Joshua Brorby

Photo of Joshua Brorby
Visiting Assistant Professor
205 Tate Hall
Education

PhD 2021, Washington University in St. Louis

Research and Teaching

Nineteenth-century British literature, religion and literature, literature of the British empire

Joshua Brorby teaches courses on Victorian literature, the intersections of literature and religion, the novel, and critical theory. His research focuses on nineteenth-century religious conversion, sexuality, and the overlaps of religious, scientific, and sexual discourses in novels and poetry. He is currently working on his first manuscript, Faith in Translation: Comparative Religion and the Feeling of Identity in Victorian Literary Culture, which explores how the discourses of sexuality and religion together disclose a relation to identity that is rooted in sentiment and activity. With attention to comparative religion and writing from both the colonies and the British Isles, this project contends that the Victorian period witnessed a surprising tendency toward flexibility of belief and being that depended on imaginative acts of translation and composition.

Selected Publications

“Christ Among the Decadents: Re-Encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World.” Victorian Poetry, special issue “Victorian Re-Encounters.” Forthcoming 2023.

“Translation.” Victorian Literature and Culture, special issue “Keywords Redux.” Forthcoming 2023.

“Dialects of Faith: Pluralism and Poetic Translation in F. Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East.” Religion & Literature. Forthcoming 2023.

“Our Mutable Inheritance: Testing Victorian Philology in Our Mutual Friend.” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, 2020, pp. 47-66.

“Seeming as Believing: Epistemological Uncertainty and the World of Annus Mirabilis.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, vol. 43, no. 1, 2019, pp. 29-50.