Rate My Professor Carolyn Betensky

Carolyn Betensky serves as Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1997, an M.A. in French from the same institution in 1989, and a B.A. magna cum laude in French from Barnard College in 1984. Betensky joined the University of Rhode Island in 2004 as an Assistant Professor of English, advancing to Associate Professor in 2011 and full Professor in 2017. Prior to URI, she was Assistant Professor of English and Honors, and Associate Director of the Program in the Human Sciences at George Washington University from 1998 to 2004. She also held preceptorships and adjunct positions at Columbia University from 1988 to 1998.

Her research interests encompass Victorian literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, and psychoanalysis, with a focus on nineteenth-century British and world literature, literature of protest, and the compartmentalization of experience in Victorian culture. Betensky is the author of Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Social-Problem Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2010). She co-translated and annotated The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue (Penguin Classics, 2015). Notable articles include “Casual Racism in Victorian Literature” (Victorian Literature and Culture, 2019), “‘It’s Out o’ Sight Out o’ Mind wi’ You’: Seriality, Compartmentalization, and North and South” (Victorian Studies, 2024), and “Gaskell, Ghosts, and the Common Good” (Victorian Literature and Culture, 2023, co-authored). She has co-edited special journal issues and contributed chapters and essays on related topics. Betensky has received awards such as the Established Career Solidarity Award from URI AAUP (2022), Center for the Humanities Sabbatical Fellowship (URI, 2011), and Kenny Teaching Award (George Washington University, 2001). Actively involved in academic labor advocacy, she served on the URI-AAUP board from 2014 to 2023, as chapter secretary from 2019 to 2023. She is a contributing editor to the AAUP’s Academe blog and co-founder of Tenure for the Common Good in 2017. Currently, she is working on a book about compartmentalization in Victorian culture and a translation of Jules Vallès’s Le Bachelier.