These are hard times for Victorianists. Perhaps for all humanists. Indeed, for all those who work in higher education. Such is the argument of Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article. Hayot and Seybold contend,

Feeling such peril, we academics uneasily watch the rise of post-tenure reviews at places like the University of Florida and the University of South Dakota, the pauses in graduate program admissions, and the shuttering of presses such as Bucknell UP and journals like the storied Gettysburg Review. We hold vigil in the wake of program consolidations and department closures prompted by austerity measures at universities and colleges across the nation, while the diminishing number of humanities majors has been our shared preoccupation for nearly two decades. Such calamitous change leaves us in mourning, wondering what has become of the stable, even sacred ground of our professional world. It feels, at times, like we work in the ruins of our profession. Walking through the rubble of disruption and disavowal, one experiences the familiar affects of loss, sorrow, pessimism … a sense of failure. What follows here is one Victorianist’s attempt to make sense of this moment—to feel grief, yes, but also to think through and beyond that grief to land on something akin to hope. I begin with a report from the trenches of my field, of use especially to PMLA readers who are not Victorianists. I think it is a story that will resonate with you, and I wager you have your own versions of this story.

The 2025 North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference at Georgetown University chose a timely theme: Aftermaths. The conference organizers, Patrick O’Malley and Nathan Hensley, set the mood in their welcome note: “As of this writing, the federal government has been shut down, secret police roam American streets, genocide continues abroad, and the very principle of higher education has come under sustained attack.” They invited participants to think about the “loop effects, webs, and ripples ambiguously linking the period of Victorian modernization with its aftermaths today.” Since academics tend to be earnest students, this language shaped the presenters’ choices and was reflected throughout the program. If one looks at the list of paper titles, a story reveals itself. Words of interest include the following: disavowal, waiting, echoes, the unfinished, legacies, perseverance, inheritance, nostalgia and solastalgia, afterlives, revival, revising, repurposing, (re)forming, regeneration, time loops, loss, resonance, afterwardness, utopia, apocalypse, futurity. Time interested many presenters given the conference’s theme and broader cultural disquietude, and there seemed to be more talks focused on teaching than usual. Neither trend is surprising; circumstances require that we consider whether our work has grown obsolete. Just as pressing, we must ask how we can contribute to the study of literature and how we might make nineteenth-century texts, histories, and cultures compelling to those we teach. Such challenges might occasion the good and necessary internal audits called for in times of reckoning.Footnote ¹ I have long thought that we could all be better versed in the histories of our respective fields, although perhaps I am only admitting to a gap in my training. Either way, certain questions merit our attention: Who preceded us in this profession? How did Victorian studies come to be? Why does it matter to us still? How has this field changed and in what ways has it needed to alter its methodologies, objects of study, and sense of its disciplinary contours? Certainly, we have long battled over what to call ourselves—specifically if the Victorianist category is too entangled with a single leader, nation, and empire, or with the structures and systems of racial capitalism and fossil-fueled modernity. Indeed, Victorianism might be equated with badness; some may even feel shame about what and whom they teach.

For Victorianists, three consequential moments stand out in the history of our field: the founding of the flagship journal Victorian Studies at Indiana University in 1956; the 2015 debut of the V21 Collective and their manifesto for a new Victorianism for the twenty-first century; and the 2020 publication of the Los Angeles Review of Books essay “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” written by Alicia Mireles Christoff, Amy R. Wong, and Ronjaunee Chatterjee, which subsequently appeared in expanded form in a special issue of Victorian Studies dedicated to the matter of undisciplining the field. Victorian Studies began its life as, and remains in many respects, the premier venue for the interdisciplinary energies of a newly established field. Sixty years later, V21 arrived on the scene, endorsing a different approach to the past by diverging from a positivist historicism and rejecting strictly teleological conceptions of time’s passing. They proposed a strategic presentism that recognized the many ways the past shows up in the present: exploring genealogy, yes, but not exclusively. They are also attuned to legacies, hauntings, echoes, time loops, and slips. For them, the past is never truly past, and it can become a resource for the present; furthermore, the strategic presentist accounts for the historical conditions of their own situatedness. The LARB article, armed with this sense of the presence of the past, served as a response to Christina Sharpe’s call for undisciplining. The piece aimed to “radically unthink and even unmake” Victorian studies itself by exposing “the racism that undergirds Victorian Studies and maintains it, demographically, as an almost entirely white field.”

When I attended NAVSA in 2025, I came to Washington, DC, in an unsettled state of mind. I was not especially keen to be in our nation’s capital. I gasped when I glimpsed the demolished East Wing of the White House from my airplane window. (I suppose I had hoped the images bombarding social media were deepfakes.) I certainly was not eager to encounter the National Guard on city streets nor to be anywhere near our country’s leader, though I was fairly certain he was at his so-called Winter White House. Our conference visit to the National Gallery had already been canceled because of the government shutdown, and several international scholars had decided that entering the United States was not worth the risk. A single nation’s politics were, in effect, disquieting both my work life and my innermost self. Yet I also made the trip somehow energized, traveling as I was with two compelling forthcoming PMLA articles on my mind: Emily Steinlight’s “Victorian Studies and the American State” and Jacob Romanow’s “Provincializing Victorian Studies: A. Native’s Marita among Literary Traditions.” I recognized the dialogue taking place between these two articles, though neither had been written with knowledge of the other. Both articles prompted me to ponder the nature and potential of our field’s work—to locate and to defend its purpose, relevance, and significance. Steinlight’s essay gives us a history of our discipline by focusing on the first of the three key moments I mentioned earlier: the 1956 founding of Victorian Studies. She recounts the journal’s origin story, situating it within the political milieu at the time of the journal’s inception. Romanow’s article is both an engagement with a specific text, the 1886–88 Ghanaian novel Marita; or, The Folly of Love—the earliest known African novel in English written by a nonsettler—and a broader argument about what it would mean to “provincialize” the field of Victorian studies. Let us first consider each article independently.

Steinlight contends that a crucial aspect of Victorian studies’ past has been overlooked and underexplored: that is, the origins of the field in a post–World World II era and in a, largely and somewhat counterintuitively, US context. In effect, Steinlight explores “the Americanness of Victorian studies.” The essay offers a driving assertion that the Victorian “function[s] as historical analogy for mid-century US global hegemony”; in other words, quoting the essay again, “the study of Victorian literature is contingent on that field’s relation to the American state.” Steinlight’s research effectively reanimates the era of Sputnik, the Cold War, and civil rights. Literary study, the social sciences, government, scholars, statecraft, and the ambition of interdisciplinarity all play roles in her account. Steinlight’s command of the archive pertaining to the founding of Victorian Studies, including early articulations of the journal’s mission and assessments of its ambitions, is impressive and further strengthened by her nimble use of the work of such scholars as Devin Griffiths, Sukanya Banerjee, and Ryan Fong who have also written reflections from and about the field. The essay illuminates a historical, political, psychocultural convergence that helps contextualize perceived silences in Victorian studies concerning race, power, and particularly whiteness. The essay’s spectacular conclusion broadens its scope to consider a range of present-day responses to the Americanness of Victorian studies: We can decenter both the United Kingdom and the United States, turn comparatist, or redeploy the analogy of the Victorian as the United States to examine late style in a declining empire. Here Steinlight returns to an earlier moment in her argument that offered three ways to understand an American relationship to a Victorian past: analogy, genealogy, and allegory. In our own damaged present, she concludes, Victorian literature may, analogically speaking, have even more to tell us about knowledge work, late-stage capitalism, fossil-fueled modernity, and the geopolitics of a nation in decline.

Romanow opens his essay with a broad view, presenting a survey of Victorian as a “field designator.” Romanow’s sampling demonstrates how different understandings of Victorian have prompted different sets and sorts of questions. He tracks over time a widening and a narrowing of the category, tensions between universalism and particularism, and debates over whether nineteenth-century or Victorian is the field’s preferred term. He provides a survey of scholars who have tested methodological parameters to uncover what is at stake as well as the institutional and departmental factors that inflect these shifts in, and battles about, scholarly work. Of special salience to his argument is the field’s “globalizing” turn and, in particular, the global Victorians’ centering of the anglophone, against which Romanow’s own position is most firmly situated. The second half of the article turns to its case study. After pondering how nineteenth-centuryists might read Marita, Romanow offers an interpretation that relies on “provincializing the Victorian.” Acknowledging a debt to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Romanow aims to divest the purviews of Victorian as well as Victorianism of any presumptions of universalism. These markers can then stand for “nonprivileged agent[s] within an irreducibly plural modernity.” For Romanow, the term Victorian might best be understood as a literary tradition or a field of references. In effect, he narrows the scope and revives the moribund category of tradition. Victorian, Romanow argues, provides a useful countercategory, of which a text such as Marita seems aware, even as it also remains strenuously local in both its focus and its nonportability. Romanow situates Marita in relation to its local readership, examining the novel’s discursive moves that drive community formation and recounting its serialized publication in Ghanaian newspapers that provided a forum for activist debate. Provincializing the Victorian allows us to hear the multivalences of such a text, as Romanow lands on a recognizably Bakhtinian position regarding the heteroglossia evident in Marita—a double-voicedness discernible only by examining the text’s relation to the Victorian. Defending literary tradition as a heuristic, Romanow argues that such traditions always constitute and understand themselves differentially; they are “constellation[s] of texts,” out of which a vast and shifting range of intertextual possibilities arises.

Both essays provide the reader an opportunity to query who we (this we will shift depending on the reader) are and what is at stake in our scholarship. As higher education remains under siege, one is left to wonder who we can still be, collectively. Specifically, Romanow asks, what can Victorianists bring to the proverbial table when we have grown dismissive of our field’s own subject matter? The fieldwork undertaken by these essays reminds academics of all disciplines that, though our work conditions may shift, two elements appear to remain timeless: the imperative of relevance and the unassailable sense of purpose that calls us to our vocation. If Victorianism is, as Romanow argues, a “field of reference,” then Victorianism is also us. We are the referent: Victorianists who work within certain circumstances of labor and institutional cultures. Romanow’s focus on a Victorian novel provides an occasion for literary scholars, regardless of their areas of specialization, to reckon with their respective professional pasts and present. Prompted by Steinlight, we Victorianists might productively ask ourselves the questions she asks of mid-century scholars. What does the idea of Victorian culture offer scholars today, whether based in the United States or elsewhere? What might we need to say about our commitments and our class alignments? Is the hegemonic still with us? Such questions prompt us to consider how we are, according to Steinlight, “meeting the moment.”

Reading Steinlight and Romanow reminds me that, in our present-day work, we Victorianists contend with two distinct pasts: the nineteenth century itself and the collective past of the scholars who precede us. Thus, another question arises: Do we fairly, fully represent these two pasts? Devin Griffiths argues that nineteenth-century historicisms were often strategic and presentist in many of the “right ways” (“Remaking Victorian Poetry”; see also Age of Analogy)—ways of thinking that are transhistorical, transnational, and comparatist. And, in his 2022 NAVSA keynote address, Cannon Schmitt points out that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Catherine Hall, Edward Said, and Susan Gubar—each of whom played a key role in critical theory, postcolonial studies, and queer studies and wrote extensively on race, nation, gender, and sexuality—were, among other things, Victorianists. Fairness sounds like a question of ethics; it is also a matter of accuracy. At the conclusion of her essay, Steinlight returns to her opening question—“What has the nineteenth century done for us lately?”—to prompt further consideration of how the nineteenth century and our practices in Victorianist scholarship respond to and shape the historical circumstances of our moment. A thought experiment comes to mind here: How will a future historian assess the scholarship of the 2020s? And how have we utilized not only the Victorian past but also the Victorianist past for our own present? Does Steinlight’s characterization of a midcentury intellectual elite seem apropos for us and our moment as well? Might we be susceptible to our own fantasies regarding intellectual labor when we fashion ourselves as scholar-activists, organizers, or Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s “subversive intellectual” (26)? Do we not remain elite knowledge workers, but of some different sort? Does a kind of triumphalism still resonate in our work? Consideration of the historical conditions that shape our work echoes the language of the eighth thesis in the V21 manifesto: “One outcome of post-historicist interpretation may be a new openness to presentism: an awareness that our interest in the period is motivated by certain features of our own moment.”

In The Teaching Archive, Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan invite us to consider how one goes about recounting the history—or a history—of literary study. For these coauthors, the teaching archive is an undervalued repository of evidence for the work we do as literary scholars. It can provide crucial support as we build fuller, more accurate accounts of our profession. What is more, Buurma and Heffernan demonstrate, studying this material leads us to challenge cherished narratives about our work lives, narratives often constructed selectively—that is, on the sole basis of our scholarly labors. Buurma and Heffernan urge caution in how we deploy “the usual figures of method war” to tell our professional story (7); and they are certainly wise to our overused tropes (split, divide, impasse, and pendulum, and its characteristic and reassuring swing). These go-to tropes perpetuate what we often insist is a tension between form and context or formalists and historicists; their utility enshrines, perhaps even exaggerates, generational methodological shifts. The intellectual labor of manifesto writing can be for Buurma and Heffernan especially susceptible to “misrepresenting our practice” and to misconstruing, at times glibly, the work of others (9).

Their insight leads me to reflect on the nature of our interactions when we stake out our respective scholarly territories. To be a scholar is to encounter and engage with the thoughts of others. Although we are accompanied and fortified by our own ideas, we exist among others who frequently think otherwise. This basic job description is instantiated most sharply in peer review. Always anonymous and usually invisible, this work is rarely remunerated. The necessity for anonymity means that such work garners few accolades or little social capital. Even in these hard times, the human exchange implicit to peer review—work that is at once foundational and social—continues. By providing anonymous and uncompensated feedback to our peers, we enact a crucial ethic of scholarship: honoring the work. Peer review is a demonstration of solidarity, a disciplinary approach to work especially worth protecting in a political environment that devalues education and discredits expertise and knowledge fields. I would even argue that peer review is an intrinsically humanistic endeavor uniquely equipped to withstand today’s tidal waves of disinformation. In our capacity as peer reviewers, we contribute to a collective not because we seek new entries on our CVs but because the collective merits our care. As peer reviewers, we sanctify critique. Guided by the imperative of listening to others, we resist the temptation of quick judgment; our primary objective is to understand. In our difficult times, I am heartened by the endurance of this conceptual work. This engagement with complexity and possibility, coupled with the care shown to the creative articulation of “intimate elaboration” (Hensley 4), is one way to understand what we mean by a discipline.

At the 2025 NAVSA conference, I noted considerable attention directed toward organizing efforts at various institutions—attention prompted, no doubt, by the reduction of funding, the downsizing of departments, and the casualization of academic labor. As alarming as these trends are, I do not believe that unionizing should be our sole tactic when confronting critics of higher education, and it cannot be our only instantiation of collective action. Other forms of professional collaboration exist to secure our position in an uncertain and unknown future. I am thinking of the cooperative energies of Vcologies (v-cologies.org), Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (undiscipliningvc.org), Against AI (against-a-i.com), One More Voice (onemorevoice.org), and Humanities Works (humanitiesworks.org). Peer reviewing, reading journals such as this one, and teaching—all necessary interventions that speak to Edward Said’s notion of the “affiliative” (19–21)—also contribute to that hopeful dynamism. We do not, and cannot, do this work alone; the concept of a discipline gives us a community sufficiently nimble to shift and find commonality across differences.

Intellectual practice, by definition, is a collaborative undertaking between past and present, authors and readers, professors and students, and among scholars. Different methodologies require differing commitments, yet we are all, in our own ways, committed to our work. Our profession values what Hensley describes as “restorative attention” (26). Our inherited past—which we variously work within and against; which we reassemble, alter, translate—informs how we understand and carry out our work. The daily labor of scholar-teachers is local and human-scaled; it requires us to summon some sort of love for the world, what Hannah Arendt called “amor mundi.”Footnote ² The aims of our profession are many: We ask questions, envision structures changed and reimagined, study the reality-building power of language, and insist on the consequentiality of encounters with beauty and art. Martin Heidegger posited that care precedes reason; our care for the world, and for our existence within it, is primordial.Footnote ³ We Victorianists, trained by the likes of George Eliot and Charles Darwin, tend to invoke metaphors of the web or the tissue when we think about our disciplinary work. Each is an apt trope for figuring our way of being in the world, especially during these times. The vital (here I mean both senses of the word, crucial and lively) effort of engaging in conversation with colleagues such as Emily Steinlight and Jacob Romanow reminds me that discipline-based scholarship, whatever your field, matters as it always has. It is our work.