Rate My Professor Veronica Alfano

Veronica Alfano is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Literature within the School of Humanities at Macquarie University. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University in 2011 and her B.A. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. Alfano specializes in Victorian poetry and poetics, with particular interests in lyric theory, gender and sexuality, memory, and media studies. Her research theorizes the links among mnemonic form, cultural nostalgia, and memory as a theme in lyric verse, arguing that lyric illuminates the Victorian era’s fascination with mourning and memorializing the past through unstable forms of recollection embodied in nineteenth-century amnesiac nostalgia. She welcomes supervision of projects in poetry, nineteenth-century literature, and these specialized areas.

Alfano's scholarly contributions include her monograph The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She co-edited Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) with Andrew Stauffer and Victorian Poetry: An Anthology (Broadview Press) with Erik Gray. Additional works encompass co-editing a special issue of Victorian Poetry on “Gender and Genre” (summer 2019) with Lee O’Brien, and articles such as “Technologies of Forgetting: Phonographs, Lyric Voice, and Rossetti's Woodspurge” (Victorian Poetry, 2017) and “Morris and Masculinity: Re-Reading 'Riding Together'” (Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 2020). Forthcoming projects feature her monograph Victorian Poetry and the Reinvention of Language: Neologistic Imaginations (Ohio University Press) and a multivolume compendium of primary sources on lyric in the long nineteenth century (Routledge). She has received the Donald Gray Prize (North American Victorian Studies Association, 2018), Early Career Researcher Enabling Scheme (2022), Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship (2014), McCosh Teaching Award (2011), and Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (2005). Alfano led the NAVSA Poetry Caucus from 2020 to 2023, serves as series editor for Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield Publishers (2022–2025), and has organized seminars, research fairs, and delivered invited talks including at “The Kangaroo Kelmscott: Australianizing Arts and Crafts” (2022).