Seminar Director

Archived content. The NEH Summer Seminar “Why Literature Matters”
occurred from June 24-July 21, 2018.

Janice Carlisle

Professor of English
Yale University

Janice Carlisle, Professor of English at Yale University, will be leading the 2018 seminar on Why Literature Matters, a topic that she has explored previously with public-school teachers enrolled in the Yale National Initiative, a program that draws its participants from across the country and brings them to Yale for an intensive two-week summer session. Also for the National Initiative, she has led a seminar on the relation between word and image called Picture Writing, as well as three similar seminars for the Yale New Haven Teachers Institute, whose offerings are open to teachers in New Haven public schools. This experience, she readily attests, has provided her with some of the happiest and most meaningful times that she has had in the classroom in over forty years of teaching.

Professor Carlisle (A.B., Mount Holyoke; Ph.D, Cornell) taught at the University of Virginia, Washington University in St. Louis, and Tulane University before coming to Yale in 2004. She has published books and articles on Victorian fiction, autobiography, journalism, and visual culture, including a study of John Stuart Mill and, most recently, an examination of the relation between art and politics from the 1830s to the 1860s, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain. In the last ten years, the nexus of word and image has become her central interest, and her current project deals with the politics of the epic painting titled Work (1853-1865) by Ford Madox Brown.