Pembroke Center

Christina Gilligan is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department. She holds a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Public Policy Analysis from Indiana University-Bloomington, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a M.A. in English from Brown University. Her research centers on the nineteenth-century British novel. Her dissertation project explores readerly identification as a key site of both innovation and anxiety in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. While critics have long associated the nineteenth-century novel with an uncritical encouragement of identification, the identificatory engagements of Britain’s realist authors were marked by ambivalence and instability. Indeed, the project argues that the questions it poses about the pleasures, limits, and power of identification, as well as the suitability of identification for various aesthetic, ethical, and political projects, were also open questions for these authors — questions with which they attempted to grapple through formal experimentation and adjustments in their novelistic projects. Christina has served as an editorial assistant for differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and as a member of the senior editorial board for the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender.