
Jonathan Farina, Ph.D.
Special Advisor to the Provost and Associate Professor of English
Department of English
(973) 761-9359
Email
Presidents Hall
Room 208
Jonathan Farina, Ph.D.
Special Advisor to the Provost and Associate Professor of English
Department of English
Jonathan Farina serves as co-chair of the Seton Hall Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. He also serves as President of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA). Farina teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, and critical theory, as well as the Honors Colloquia on the Ancient and Early-Modern Worlds.
He writes about the history of fiction as a form of knowledge and Victorian literature, science, and culture. His first book, Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press 2017), earned Honorable Mention for the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies. It describes the grammar of everyday language that underwrites what counted as knowledge for British writers, from Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Ruskin, Pater, Lyell, Darwin, and Tyndall. "Characterization," it shows, was a historically specific mode of description that represented things other than fictional people and that aimed not to reproduce facts but to deviate from them—and yet still tell the truth.
Farina is working on a second book, "Aformalism: Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism and the Dispositions of Modern Knowledge," which recasts Victorian literary criticism as a rich repository of alternative, never-institutionalized forms of knowledge production rather than a mere genealogy of new criticism or other contemporary modes of interpretation. To this end, he is finishing articles on "awkwardness" as the constitutive affect of literary criticism, the problems with recognizing the "obvious" as knowledge, and the Victorian stylistic conventions of "theory".
Jonathan has delivered invited talks at Princeton, Columbia, Toronto, Rutgers, the Grad Center at CUNY, the New York Public Library, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and elsewhere. He has presented dozens of conference papers throughout North America and the UK.
Education
- Ph.D., New York University
- M.A., New York University
- B.S., Boston College
Scholarship
Books
- Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Reviewed by:
- Daniel Tyler in Victorian Studies
- Matthew Sussman in Modern Philology
- Barbara Black in Review-19
- Camilla Cassidy in TLS
- Anna E. Clark, Tara K. Menon, and Daniel Wright in V21 Collations
- Stefan Waldschmidt in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
- Michael Hollington in Dickens Quarterly
- Michael Wiley in The Wordsworth Circle
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
- “Stock Exchanges. On Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray,” in My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice, ed. Annette R. Federico (University of Missouri Press 2020), 155-74.
- "Character," Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 609-12
- "As a Matter of Course': Trollope's Ordinary Realism" in The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, eds. Margaret Markwick, Deborah Morse, and Mark Turner. New York: Routledge, 2016. 142-53
- "On the Genealogy of 'Deportment': Being 'Present' in Bleak House," Special Issue on the V21 Symposium. boundary 2 online, October 4, 2016.
- "Literary Histories of Natural Historical Books," Victorian Literature and Culture 44.2 (June 2016): 411-21
- "Allusive Tactics: R. H. Horne, Induction, and 'Desultory Criticism," Nineteenth-Century Prose 43.1-2 (Spring 2016): 115-34
- "Mad Libs and Stupid Critics." Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, 46 (1), 325-338, August 2015.
- "Whoever Explains a "But": Tact and Friction in Trollope's Reparative Fiction." Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, no. 128, 139-61, September 2015.
- "Literary Criticism." Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, eds. Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes. Wiley-Blackwell, July 2015.
- "The Excursion and the Surfaces of Things." The Wordsworth Circle 45.2, Special Issue on the Bicentennial of The Excursion guest-edited by Tom Duggett and Jacob Risinger, 99-105, April 2014.
- "David Masson's British Novelists and their Styles (1859) and the Establishment of Novels as an Object of Academic Study." BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, June 2012.
- "Dickens's 'As If': Analogy and Victorian Virtual Reality." Victorian Studies 53.3, 427-36, February 2011.
- "'A Certain Shadow': Personified Abstractions and the Form of Household Words." Victorian Periodicals Review, 42(4), 392- 415, December 2010.
- "Flash Reading: Tom and Jerry and the Last Subordinations of Plot to Character." The Wordsworth Circle, 41(2), May 2010.
- "The New Science of Literary Mensuration: Accounting for Readers, Then and Now." Victorians Institute Journal Digital Annex 38, n.p., January 2010.
- "Middlemarch and 'That Sort of Thing.'" RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 53, February 2009.
- "Dickens, Besides the Point: Chesterton, Obviousness, Knowledge," The Chesterton Review 46.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2020): 369-80.
Reviews
- New Rambler Review
- Scholarly reviews and review essays of dozens of books published and forthcoming in European Romantic Review, Journal of British Studies, Modern Philology, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Notes & Queries, Review-19 (NBOL), Victorian Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle.
Accomplishments
Fellowships
- Associate Fellow, 2010-11, Seminar "The Ordinary and the Everyday," Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University
Elected Positions and Appointments
- President, Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA), 2018-
- Delegate Assembly, Modern Language Association (LLC Victorian and Early 20th-Century English), 2018-
- Trustee, The Dickens Society, 2018-
- Chair of the Faculty Senate (2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2020-2021)
Awards
- Honorable Mention, Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies (2017)