Anna Gibson

Bio

Anna Gibson works on the literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, with a focus on the Victorian novel and its relationship to cultural and social life. She is interested in narrative form, especially how it has shaped psychological and cultural theories of human identity and relationships.

She is the co-director of the Digital Dickens Notes Project, which explores Charles Dickens’s working notes to demonstrate the serial unfolding of his novels and the dynamic networks of interaction between characters and readers, and between notes and novel, they facilitate. She is also working on a project about the relationship between the form of the novel and modern conceptions of human consciousness and agency. She is also researching how Victorian serial writers reconfigured our understanding of the relationship between narrative and time, and the associations between storytelling and contemporaneity.

Dr. Gibson was inducted into the NC State Academy of Outstanding Teachers in 2023 and is a recipient of both the NC State Outstanding Teacher Award and the NC State Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award.

Website: http://annagibson.com/

Teaching and Research Interests

• victorian literature
• nineteenth-century british fiction
• british literature from 1800
• narrative form and formalism
• novel theory
• history of psychology
• visual culture
• critical theory
• digital humanities

In addition to teaching in the English department, I am the Coordinator of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences first-year interdisciplinary inquiry class, HSS 120. This course introduces first-semester NCSU undergraduates to the intellectual life and variety in our College by examining a central topic, engaging with faculty from various humanities and social science disciplines, and orienting students to opportunities and resources across the college and university to prepare them for fulfilling and successful academic careers.

Read more about my teaching on my website.

Publications & Projects

Digital Project

• Digital Dickens Notes Project: This interactive scholarly edition of Charles Dickens’s Working Notes features visually-faithful color transcriptions, extensive editorial annotations, critical introductions, and pedagogical resources. Co-directed with Dr. Adam Grener, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.
  • Annotated Critical Edition of the Little Dorrit Working Notes, published December 2023.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

•  “Digital Deliverables: The Digital Dickens Notes Project.” Victorians Institute Journal 49 (2022): 210-223 (with Adam Grener, Frankie Goodenough, and Scott Bailey)
• “Charlotte Brontë’s First Person.” Narrative 25.2 (2017): 203-226. (Honorable Mention, Donald Gray Prize for Best Essay in Victorian Studies published in 2017)
• “Our Mutual Friend and Network Form.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 48.1 (2015): 63-84.

Book Reviews

• Book Forum (reflection & responses), Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science by David Sweeney Coombs. V21 Collations Forum, December 2020
• Review of The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan. Novel: A Forum on Fiction (forthcoming, 2018).
• “Passenger Networks.” Review of Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel by Jonathan H. Grossman. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 46:3 (fall 2013): 478-482.

Work in Progress

Articles/Chapters in Process

Gibson, Anna and Adam Grener. “Annotating Serial Process.” Digital Dickens (edited collection edited by Claire Wood, Emily Bell, and Pete Orford). Forthcoming from White Rose Press, 2025.

Gibson, Anna. “Curating Sensational Objects: Victorian Sensation in the 21^st-Century Classroom.” The Routledge Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Anne-Marie Beller and Tara MacDonald. Forthcoming 2025.

Book Projects

Dickens in Process: The Serial Formation of the Novel (co-authored monograph with Dr. Adam Grener)

Forming People: Psychology and Victorian Novel Form: Argues that the literary form of the novel in the Victorian era played a vital role in the development of modern human psychology. Reading canonical and popular novels alongside scientific and psychological writing about the mind and body from the 1840s to 1890s, Forming People shows how novels by writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot intervened in debates about the nature of mind. They did so not merely by referencing new psychological theories in their content, but by representing, enacting, and experimenting with the experience of human consciousness in ways that were not possible in scientific writing.

Presentations

Invited Talks

• Invited plenary speaker, “Dickens’s Notes and Serial Formation,” Interdisciplinarity and Seriality Panel, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference, March 2018
• “Digital Dickens Notes: Form and Formation,” Duquesne University Series on Digital Humanities in the 21st Century, March 2017.
•  “Pattern and Process: Charles Dickens’s Working Notes and Serial Form,” University of Pittsburgh Department of English, December 2016
• Skype visit to Dr. Rachel Buurma’s Victorian Research Seminar at Swarthmore College: lecture and discussion of Charles Dickens’s working notes and the Digital Dickens Notes Project, March 2016.
•  “The Digital Dickens Notes Project,” Digital Humanities Sandbox Chat Series, Duke University, March 2015.

Selected Presentations

• Interactive Session Leader: “Discussion in the Margins: Using Annotation Tools to Promote Student Engagement with Texts and Peers in Online and In-Person Courses.” NC State Conference on Faculty Excellence. March 6, 2024 (forthcoming).
• “An Unnecessary Infliction of Pain on the Reader’: Teaching Hard Texts in Hard Times,” Victorians Institute Conference, October 7-8, 2023.
• Roundtable co-organizer and presenter: ChatGPT: Adapt, Reject, Embrace? An Interdisciplinary Roundtable. North Carolina State University Conference on Faculty Excellence, March 9, 2023
• Roundtable organizer and presenter: “Just Assignments: Rethinking Student Work in the Victorian Studies Classroom.” Presentation: “What Students Do with Texts: (Re)Defining Our Goals for the Victorian Literature Classroom. North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Lehigh University, October 2022.
• “‘To be worked out as in life’: Forming and Re-forming Little Dorrit.” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Bloomington, IN, November 9-11, 2023.
• “Illuminating Serial Temporality: The Digital Dickens Notes Project.” Victorians Institute Conference, Charlotte NC, October 22-24, 2021.
• “Rethinking the Late British Survey: Anti-Racist Teaching Strategies.” Department of English, North Carolina State University, November 2021.
• “Using Annotation Tools to Facilitate Close Reading and Engagement: Discussion in the Margins.” Roundtable: Online Teaching Strategies for Victorianists (and Others): Moving from Crisis to Intentionality. North American Victorian Studies Association Online Roundtable, August 5, 2020.
• “Story-Weaving: The Work of Dickens’s Serial Narrative,” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Ohio State University, October 2019.
• “Reading Dickens’s Notes.” Victorians Institute Conference, Asheville, NC, November 2018
• “Form and Life: The Strategy and Tactics of Victorian Novel Form.” NAVSA, University of Florida, FL, October 2018
• “Carry Through, Take Up, Hold Over: Choreographing Characters in Dickens’s Working Notes,” NAVSA, Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, November 2017.
• “Uncontainable Bodies: Forming Texts and Selves from Frankenstein to Dracula,” Interdisciplinary nineteenth-Century Studies Conference (INCS), Muhlenberg College, PA, March 2017
• “George Eliot’s Social Psychology: Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Narrative,” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Arizona State University, November 2016.
• “’That incongruous compound’: Francis Galton’s Composites and Fin de Siècle Novel Form,” Victorians Institute Conference, North Carolina State University, October 2016.
• Seminar organizer and presenter: “Serial Forms” seminar. Paper: “How We Read Novel Form: Victorian Seriality, Form, and Formation,” American Comparative Literature Conference (ACLA), Harvard University, March 2016.
• “Forming Towards Form in the Victorian Novel,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference (INCS), Appalachian State University, March 2016.
• “Dickens’s Serial Formation,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference, Georgia Institute of Technology, April 2015.
• “Pattern and Process: Seriality in Dickens’s Working Notes and the Digital Dickens Notes Project,” North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Western University, Canada, November 2014.
• “Sensation, Science, and (Un)Predictable People.” North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, University of Southern California, October 2013 (NAVSA Best Graduate Paper Prize)
• “’A sensation, for which I can find no name’: Detection and Sensation in Victorian Fiction.” 2013 International Conference on Narrative, University of Manchester, June 2013
• “’A continuous net-work of variable forms’: Dickens, Lewes, and Dynamic Form.” North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison, September 2012
• “Dracula and the Form of the Person.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Brown University, March-April 2012
• “Detection and Sensation: Francis Galton, Wilkie Collins, and the Forms of Personal Identity.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference, University of Kentucky, March 2012
• “Bodies Acting Out: Physiology, Narrative, and the Sensation Novel.” North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Vanderbilt University, November 2011
• “’We can hardly put ourselves in the position of these savages’: Kinship, Sympathy, and Difference in
• Darwinian Fictions.”  North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Montreal, November 2010.
• “Reading Kinship Backwards: Victorian Anthropology, the Family, and Containing/Rejecting the Past. British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS)/North American Victorian Studies Association Joint Conference, Cambridge University, August 2009