Claudia Johnson

Claudia L. Johnson is the Murray Professor of English Literature in Princeton University's Department of English. She joined the faculty in 1994 and served as Chair of the English Department from 2004 to 2012. Johnson earned her PhD from Princeton University in 1981 with a thesis titled 'Using the mind well: the moral life in Jane Austen's novels and the heritage of Johnson and Locke.' A Princeton alumna from the Class of 1981 in English, her research specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, with an especial focus on the novel. Her academic interests encompass British literature, eighteenth-century literature, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, film and media studies, literary theory, literature and ethnicity, Romanticism, and Victorian literature.

Johnson's influential publications include Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (University of Chicago Press, 1988), Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sensibility in the 1790s—Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures (University of Chicago Press, 2012). She has edited key editions such as Pride and Prejudice: A Longman Cultural Edition with Susan J. Wolfson (Pearson, 2002), The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen with Clara Tuite (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), and Jane Austen's The Beautifull Cassandra: A Novel in Twelve Chapters (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her scholarship examines topics like Jane Austen's reception, Mary Wollstonecraft, romantic gardens, and the English novel tradition. Johnson has received the 2013 Christian Gauss Award for Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures, the 2015 Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities shared with Brent Shaw, and support from major fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has delivered public lectures on Jane Austen at Princeton and other institutions, contributing to Austen studies and eighteenth-century criticism.

Professional Email: cjohnson@princeton.edu