Pembroke Center

Christina Gilligan is the 2023-24 Deans’ Faculty Fellow for the Pembroke Center and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Christina completed the requirements for a Ph.D. in English at Brown University in July 2023. She holds a B.A. in English and a B.S.B. in Public Policy Analysis from Indiana University-Bloomington, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a M.A. in English from Brown. Her research centers on the nineteenth-century British and Anglophone novel. Her first book project explores readerly identification as a key site of experimentation 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, this project demonstrates that the identificatory engagements of Britain’s realist authors were marked by ambivalence and instability. Indeed, the project maintains that the questions that it poses about the pleasures, limits, and power of identification, as well as its suitability 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 shifts in their novelistic projects. She is also at work on a second project, tentatively titled Reproductive (In)Justice in the Victorian Novel. 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. In the fall, she will teach a GNSS course titled “Reading Reproductive Injustice,” and in this spring, she will teach a GNSS course exploring the relationship between identification, identity, and gender.