Skip to main content
Skip to main menu

Slideshow

Richard Menke

Blurred image of the arch used as background for stylistic purposes.
Professor

Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information SystemsRichard 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 Inventions and Technological Things (published as 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 Garfield assassination, on Victorian fictions of the telephone, and on the end of the three-volume novel[Cover: Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880-1900]

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.

In 2019 he was awarded the President’s Award by the North American Victorian Studies Association. 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 he was inducted into UGA’s Teaching Academy in 2013.

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.

Education:

Ph.D., Stanford University, 2000.

B.A. Rice University, 1992. Summa cum laude.

Research Interests:

Primary fields: Victorian literature and culture; the novel; literature and the histories of books and other media

Other interests: literary and media theory; literature, science, and technology; literature and the environment

Support English at UGA

We greatly appreciate your generosity. Your gift enables us to offer our students and faculty opportunities for research, travel, and any number of educational events that augment the classroom experience. Support the efforts of the Department of English by visiting our giving section. 
Give Now 

EVERY DOLLAR CONTRIBUTED TO THE DEPARTMENT HAS A DIRECT IMPACT ON OUR STUDENTS AND FACULTY.