Panel Chair, “The Digital Age Library”

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Yale University. My dissertation, “Culture and Secularity,” looks at Victorian anthropological writing about religion and its life within Victorian literary culture. At the local level I’m interested in the the way that anthropological theory circulated through different print publics in the decades before anthropology became a specialized academic discipline. More broadly, I argue that anthropological theory became a site where Victorian writers debated what
kind of affiliation religion was — whether its primary locus was individual
belief or rather imagined sites of collective identity like race or culture.