Rachel Teukolsky is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She researches aesthetic philosophy, media history, and the political histories of culture, with a focus on nineteenth-century Britain. She is the author of The Literate Eye (Oxford UP, 2009), which studies Victorian writing about the visual arts; and Picture World (Oxford UP 2020), which studies the era’s new visual media, in objects ranging from pictorial journalism to mass photography. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Novel, ELH, Public Books, and elsewhere.

Her second book includes a chapter on the Victorian illustrated Bible, likely the most popular illustrated book of the nineteenth century, and an item whose contradictions speak profoundly to European political identity, especially in relation to imperialism and otherness. This chapter opens onto some of the issues driving her current research, which centers on nineteenth-century nationalism, postcolonialism, revolution, and race. In 2022 she published “Romanticism on the Right: Benjamin Disraeli’s Authoritarian Aesthetics” in Victorian Studies. Her most recent work is a book project on comparative nineteenth-century nationalisms that begins with the Haitian Revolution. The project’s archive includes history-writing, literature, the visual culture of early Haiti, and the anthropology of religion. At conferences over the last two years, she has presented papers on “Haiti and the Idea of Black Nationalism” and “Haiti, Britain, and the Long Enlightenment of Nations.”