Pembroke Center

Christina Gilligan is a scholar and teacher of literature, law, and gender studies. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Her current manuscript, Readerly Identification from Austen to Hardy, analyzes the forms through which identification is courted and resisted in the realist novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. While critics have long associated the nineteenth-century British novel with the uncritical (or even embarrassing) encouragement of identification, this project demonstrates that the identificatory engagements of these authors were marked by ambivalence and reflexivity. Indeed, the project maintains that the questions it poses about the powers, pleasures, and limitations of identification, as well as its suitability for various aesthetic, ethical, and political projects, were also open questions for these authors, who attempted to grapple with them through formal experimentation and shifts in their novelistic projects.

She is also at work on a law and the humanities project that brings the Black feminist framework of reproductive justice to bear on representations of reproductive harm in Anglophone novels of the late-nineteenth century, a time of escalating legal, medical, and administrative restriction of bodily autonomy and reproductive liberty in Britain and its colonies.