Gender and Women's Studies

 

Arielle Zibrak is an Associate Professor of English, affiliated with Gender and Women's Studies, and Director of the English Honors Program.

She is the author of Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures (NYU Press, 2021) and the editor of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019). Current book projects include a monograph on the nineteenth-century rise of Anglo-American realist novels of reform and the various ways in which this literature was resisted on aesthetic grounds as well as a public-facing work tentatively titled In the Image of Our Own Desires, on the relationship between the New Thought and Arts & Crafts movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their impact on the popular womens literature of the period. Other interests include American women writers, gender & sexuality studies, the fin de siècle, aesthetic theory, and the relationship between art and politics more broadly.

She began teaching at the University of Wyoming in 2014 and received the University of Wyoming College of Arts and Sciences Extraordinary Merit in Teaching Award in 2017. She has served on the Executive Board of The Edith Wharton Society and the advisory board of the Complete Works of Rebecca Harding Davis Online.

Recent and Upcoming Courses
ENGL 5320: Realism & Naturalism
ENGL 5530: Modern Critical Theory and Practice
ENGL 3500: 19th-Century American Literature
ENGL 3600: 20th-Century American Literature
ENGL 5000: The Fiction of Reform
ENGL 4640/WMST 4500: American Women Writers
ENGL 4450: African American Novel

Selected Publications 

Books: 

Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures (NYU Press, May 2021) 

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, November 2019) (volume editor and introduction author) 

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles: 

 “Power of Body / Power of Mind: Arts & Crafts, New Thought, and Popular Women’s Fiction.” American Literature (2021) 

 “Roundtable on The Age of Innocence.”  The Edith Wharton Review (2021) (co-authored) 

 “Mimesis and ‘the man marriage’: Protesting Marital Rape in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Second Life.’” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 49.7 (2020): 748-765. 

 “Kissing a Photograph: Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 58.3 (2017): 355-374.  

 “The Woman Who Hated Sex: Undine Spragg and the Trouble with ‘Bother,’” Edith Wharton Review 32 (2016): 1-19.  

 “Writing Behind a Curtain: Rebecca Harding Davis and Celebrity Reform,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 60.4 (2014): 522-556. 

 “Intolerance, a Survival Guide: Heteronormative Culture Formation in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Arizona Quarterly 68.3 (2012): 103-128. 

Reviews and Other Academic Writing: 

 “The Progressive Era’s New Optimists,” American Literary History 32.2 (Summer 2020): 376–384. 

 “Seeing Both Sides of the Shield;” review of Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life Among Writers, Sharon Harris. The Los Angeles Review of Books (21 July 2018) 

 “Rebecca Harding Davis and Media;” Rebecca Harding Davis Archives, University of Connecticut. (2016) http://rebeccahardingdaviscompleteworks.com/items/show/4 

Review of A Law Unto Herself by Rebecca Harding Davis, Ed. Alicia Mischa Renfroe, The ALH Online Review Series IX (2017) https://www.academic.oup.com/alh/pages/alh_review_series_9 

Research Interests 

Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century American Literature, Literary Realism and Naturalism, The Fin de Siècle, Social Reform, Victorian Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Feminism, Aesthetic Theory