Ruth M. McAdams
Associate teaching professor
B.A., summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania
M.Phil., University of Edinburgh
Ph.D., University of Michigan
Office: Palamountain 331
Phone: (518) 580-5174
Email: rmcadams@skidmore.edu
Teaching and Research Interests:
- Nineteenth-Century British literature
- Labor activism
- Historical fiction in a global context
- Theory of the novel
- Life-writing
- Writing Composition
Courses Taught:
- EN 105/105H: Writing Gender
- EN 105/105H: Work!
- EN 110: Introduction to Literary Studies
- EN 211: Fiction
- EN 362: Objects and Materials and/in 18th-Century Literature
- EN 362R: The “Rise” of the Novel
- EN 364: The Historical Novel in a Global Context
- EN 371: Dostoevsky (independent study)
- EN389/390: Senior Thesis
- GN 371A: The English Major and Beyond
Selected Publications
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Temporality and Progress in Victorian Literature. Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
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“Religious Violence without Religion: Bleak Secular Stasis in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 79, no. 4, March 2025, pp. 243-269.
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“‘Three Cheers for the United Aggregate Tribunal!’: Confronting Anti-Union Discourse, Then and Now.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Activism Issue, vol. 51, no. 4, Winter 2023, pp. 555-567.
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“Progress.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords Issue, vol. 46, no. 3/4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 809-812. doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000906.
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“Clothing Napoleonic History in Vanity Fair and The Trumpet-Major.” Victorian Studies, vol. 60, no. 1, Fall 2017, pp. 9-28. doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.60.1.01.
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“‘Ladies Scorn Dates!’: Women Life Writers Look Back on the Regency.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 40, no.1, Fall 2017, pp. 33-50. doi: 10.1080/08905495.2017.1393735.
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With Theresa Tinkle, Daphna Atias, and Cordelia Zukerman. “Teaching Close Reading Skills in a Large Lecture Course.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, Fall 2013, pp. 505-535. doi: 10.1215/15314200-2266432.
Work in Progress
- “The Regency of Pornography” for Nineteenth Century Literature in Transition: The 1810s, edited by Emma Mason, Cambridge University Press [book chapter, under contract]
- “Stasis and the Novel: Romola and the Rejection of Progressive Time” for The Cambridge History of Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by Carolyn Dever and Amy Kahrmann Huseby [book chapter, under contract, Cambridge University Press]
- “Chartist Poetry and the Fate of Research: A Song of the Low” [article manuscript under review]
