Education
M.A., Rutgers University, Literatures in English, 2014
B.A., Montclair State University, English and Political Science, 2011
Academic Programs
Biography
Christina Jen is a Distinguished Scholar in British and Global Literatures at Western Colorado University. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and her research interests include the Victorian novel, theater and performance studies, gender studies, women’s literature, and global melodrama. Her dissertation, “Reading as Acting: The Novel’s Casting Call and Readerly Performance in the British Nineteenth Century,” explores the relationship between representations of reading and theater culture—especially ideas about acting, respectability, and identification—in works by Jane Austen, William M. Thackeray, Mary E. Braddon, Charles Dickens, and others. She is currently working on an article exploring the ways in which Dion Boucicault’s use of Scottish folk song ironizes the colonial politics of his stage melodrama on the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Jessie Brown; or the Relief of Lucknow.
Publications
“‘Drop the Curtain’: Astonishment and Anxieties of Authorship in Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz,” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 49, no. 2, 2018, pp. 249-78.
External Professional Affiliations
Central China Normal University