Richard Menke

Richard Menke is the author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford University Press, 2008) and Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His most recent book is Victorian Material Culture: Inventions and Technological Things (part of Routledge’s Victorian Material Cultures series, 2022), an edited collection of primary documents on Victorian inventions and technologies. He has published essays on Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, and Henry James, as well as on Walt Whitman and the assassination of President James Garfield, on Victorian fictions of the telephone, and on the end of the three-volume novel. His forthcoming articles include essays on decadent nineteenth-century automata and on the early literature of the telephone.

His current research focuses on media ecologies, resource ecologies, and literature in the nineteenth century. An essay drawn from this work, on George Gissing’s New Grub Street and the history and ecology of paper (Victorian Studies, 2018), received an honorable mention for the Donald Gray Prize, awarded to the year’s best essay in the field of Victorian studies.

He has received both the Bruns Prize (best essay by a graduate student, 1998) and the Schachterle Prize (best essay by an untenured scholar, 2000 and 2005) from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, as well as the Stanford English Department’s Alden Dissertation Prize (2000). At the University of Georgia, he has received the Russell Undergraduate Teaching Award (2009) and has been inducted into UGA’s Teaching Academy (2013). In 2019 he was awarded the President’s Award by the North American Victorian Studies Association.

Menke has received both the University of Georgia’s Creative Teaching Award (2015) and its Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award (2020).

He has recently taught graduate courses on late Victorian literature; on the Victorian Anthropocene; and on media, ecologies, and literature.