Tanya Agathocleous

Tanya Agathocleous received her PhD from Rutgers University in 2003. She researches and teaches Victorian literature and culture, as well as twentieth-century Anglophone literature in transnational, colonial and postcolonial contexts. She is interested in the relationship between transnational political ideals and literary form, and in bridging the gap between Victorian, modernist and post-colonial scholarship. Courses taught at Hunter include Literary Theory; Literature and Decolonization; The Victorian City; Victorian Cosmopolitanism; Literature in the Age of Empire; and the Bildungsroman.

Her book, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2011), describes how nineteenth-century writers contributed to the emergence of a global imaginary by using London as a way to conceptualize the world as an interconnected whole. The visual forms of the sketch and the panorama—and their adaptations over the course of the century—serve as the paradigmatic antithetical modes of cosmopolitan literature, working to both differentiate and unify urban space. As well as articles and reviews, she has published an anthology on pedagogy, Teaching Literature: A Companion (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003). She has also edited Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent for Broadview Press and a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on “Victorian Cosmopolitanisms.” She is currently working on a book that uses the criminalization of “disaffection” in Indian print culture by British colonial courts as the occasion to examine the role of negative emotions in literature produced in the colonial context.