Meet our Faculty & Staff

Tara MacDonald - A Specialist in Victorian Literature and Culture.

About Me: A specialist in Victorian literature and culture, my research interests include gender, feminism, affect theory, and narrative theory. My publications include two scholarly monographs: Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (2023) and The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel (2015). I have also published two edited collections, three special journal issues, and nearly two dozen articles/book chapters. My most recent project is Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice, a collection I co-edited with Diana Bellonby and Nora Gilbert, due out in March 2026 with SUNY Press.

Biography: At the University of Lethbridge, I am Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, and I also serve as Director of the Centre for Feminist Research. I am available to supervise graduate students on projects relating to feminist history, literature, literary theory, and affect.

I am the author of The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel (Routledge, 2015) and Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (Edinburgh UP, 2023). My first book read Victorian masculinity, feminist literary history, and the marriage plot through literary representations of the New Man, the male counterpart to the feminist New Woman. My second monograph argued that Victorian sensation novels – long dismissed as plot-driven, silly, and feminine – develop complex theories of narrative affect, our embodied responses to reading, imagining, and even writing a narrative. In addition to arguing for the benefit of affect theory and the history of emotions to the study of these novels, I posit that the fluid approaches to emotion and embodiment exhibited by Victorian sensation writers can provide us with compelling models for theorizing affect today.

Most recently, I completed Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice, co-edited with Diana Bellonby and Nora Gilbert and due out in March 2026 with SUNY Press. The collection is the first to examine the cultural history of “gaslighting” as a term, concept, and form of social, political, and emotional abuse fundamentally tied to the literature and culture of the Victorian British Empire.

My work also extends beyond nineteenth-century studies: I co-edited a special issue of Studies in the Novel in 2023 entitled “Strange Temporalities: Gender, Time, and the Novel.” The global pandemic and ongoing political unrest have highlighted how women and gender diverse people, especially those from marginalized communities, experience time in precarious, fractured, and alienating ways. The collection questions how this impacts the novel as a genre and its affordances.

Finally, my recent work has focused on nineteenth-century feminist utopian literature and nineteenth-century representations of sex work. 

 

Degrees: 

PhD, English, McGill University (2008)

MA, English, Queen’s University (2002)

BA Honours, English, Dalhousie University (2001)

 

Research Areas:

  • Victorian Literature
  • Feminism and Gender Studies
  • The Novel
  • Affect Theory
  • Narrative Theory