Skip to main content
NC State Home
College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Anna Gibson

AG
Headshot of Anna Gibson

she, her

Asst Professor

Department of English

Department of Integrative Humanities & Social Sciences

Victorian Literature

Tompkins Hall 202

View CV

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 Dickens Notes, which explores Charles Dickens’s working notes to demonstrate the serial unfolding of his novels and the dynamic networks of interaction they facilitate–between characters and readers, and between notes and novel. She is the PI for an NEH Scholarly Editions & Translations grant (2026-27) to complete this project.

With her Dickens Notes co-director, Adam Grener, she is working on a co-authored book about Charles Dickens’s serial composition that shows how the material formats and temporal parameters of serial publication shaped the form of the novel. Her work also explores the relationship between the form of the novel and modern conceptions of human consciousness and agency.

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. She serves on the Advisory Board for the North American Victorian Studies Association and is a former elected member of the Dickens Society Advisory Board.

Originally from a small village in the south of England, Gibson earned an M.A. from Exeter University (UK) and a Ph.D. from Duke University (2014). She was a faculty member at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh before moving to NC State in 2018. She transitioned to the tenure track in 2025.

Website: http://annagibson.com/

Teaching and Research Interests

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

In addition to teaching in the English department, I am a member of the Department of Integrative Humanities & Social Sciences.

From 2020-25 I was the coordinator of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences first-year interdisciplinary inquiry class, HSS 120. This course introduced 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.

Publications & Projects

Digital Project

  • Dickens Notes: This interactive, NEH-funded, peer-reviewed 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.

Editions

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Book Review Essays & Interviews

Articles/Chapters Forthcoming:

  • “Annotating Serial Process” (co-authored with Adam Grener.) Digital Dickens (edited collection edited by Claire Wood, Emily Bell, and Pete Orford). Forthcoming from White Rose Press, 2026.
  • “Curating Sensational Objects: Victorian Sensation in the 21st-Century Classroom.” The Routledge Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Anne-Marie Beller and Tara MacDonald. Forthcoming 2026.
  • “Noting the Parts: The Serial Form of Great Expectations.” MLA Approaches to Teaching Great Expectations, edited by Michelle Allen-Emerson and Peter Capuano. Forthcoming 2026.

Book Project (in progress)

The Novel in Process: Charles Dickens and Serial Novel Form: Co-authored with Adam Grener

Charles Dickens was still in the process of conceiving and writing his novels as his first readers were already experiencing them, installment by serial installment. And yet scholars and readers today tend to regard Dickens as an author of completed books. By returning us to the active scenes of Dickens’s composition, The Novel in Process challenges the whole text as the privileged object of literary analysis. This book demonstrates instead how the novel’s form depends on the dynamics of its writing processes—captured in manuscripts, notes, memoranda, letters, proofs—which reveal the importance of openness and contingency to how novels are composed and read. As we show with new research into Dickens’s manuscript archives, these novels were uniquely shaped by the constraints and rhythms of serial publication. This book reimagines Dickens’s novels through the forces that gave them shape—from the integration of characters and storylines through the distended process of serial publication, to the spatial parameters of the manuscript page, the typeset column, the printed installment. The Novel in Process offers new perspectives on Dickens’s major novels and career, and, in so doing, articulates a process-based theory of the novel itself.

Presentations

Invited Talks

  • Public Lecture, “Story Weaving: Charles Dickens’s Working Notes,” Victoria & Albert Museum, July 2026.
  • Presentation and Workshop: “Dickens Creative Process,” Dickens Workshop, National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London: 1-hour talk (with Adam Grener) and two workshop sessions with Dickens’s manuscripts, March 13, 2026.
  • Invited Lecture: “Exploring Serial Form-in-Process: The Digital Dickens Notes Project,” Dickens Studies Programme Speakers series (virtual), University of Buckingham, UK, April 17, 2025
  • Invited Presentation: “Pattern & Process: Victorian Novel Form(ation),” Appalachian State University Department of English, February 24, 2025
  • 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.

Select Presentations

  • “The Novel in Motion: Material Encounters with Dickens’s Serial Composition.” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Pasadena, CA, November 2026 (forthcoming)
  • Roundtable: “Mapping the Serial Novel,” Portable Pedagogies, Embodied Practices: eaching Literature in the Age of AI, North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) / North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) Joint Conference, November 2026 (forthcoming)
  • “Interacting with Charles Dickens’s Writing Process in Mirador,” Digital Humanities Collaborative of North Carolina Institute, May 2026
  • “Novel-writing by scraps against time,” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, November 2025
  • “What is Victorian Literature?: (Re)Forming the Field in a 2025 Classroom,” Victorians Institute Conference, Furman University, SC, September 2025
  • Poster Presentation: “Collaborative Annotation,” UNC Learning and Technology Symposium, June 2025
  • Interactive Session Leader: “Facilitating Student Peer Review with Perusall,” NC State Conference on Faculty Excellence, March 2025
  • “Expanding the Margins: Annotation as Critical Practice.” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, EVENT2024, Atlanta, September 2024
  • 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.
  • “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

Education

Ph.D. English Duke University 2014

M.A. English Exeter University 2006

Area(s) of Expertise

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

Groups

  • Outstanding Teacher Award, North Carolina State University, 2023
  • Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award, North Carolina State University, 2023
  • NEH Scholarly Editions & Translations Grant, 2026-27