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Professor Tabitha Sparks

Position: 
Associate Professor
Office: 
On leave 2011-2012
Phone: 
514-398-4400 Ext 09348
Email Address: 
tabitha [dot] sparks [at] mcgill [dot] ca
Mailing Address: 

McGill University
Department of English
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Arts Building
Montreal, QC H3A 0G5 CANADA

Degrees and Academic Title(s): 

B.A. (Bates College); M.A., Ph.D. (University of Washington), Associate Professor

General Research Areas: 
Literature
Nineteenth Century
Teaching and Research Areas: 

19th Century Novel; literature and medicine; narrative theory.

Taught previously at: 

University of Washington, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University.

Awards and Fellowships: 
  • Louis Dudek Award for Excellence in Teaching/McGill University, Department of English, 2004-5
  • Marion Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship (Georgia Tech)
  • Center for Humanistic Inquiry Postdoctoral Fellowship (Emory), NEH Institute Fellowship
Selected Publications : 

"Realism after Sensation: Hardy, Gissing, Meredith," forthcoming inBlackwell's Companion to Sensation Fiction (2010)

Family Practices: Doctors and Marriage in the Victorian Novel(2009)

The Brontës in Context: Harold Bloom's Classic Authors Series (2008)

"AIDS in Africa, Cultural Studies in Georgia," Cultural Studies vol. 19. No.4 (July 2005).

“Medical Gothic and the Return of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Stoker and Machen,” Nineteenth-Century Feminisms (Fall 2003).

“Narrative Injury and Surgical Cure: Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch and Heart and Science,” Journal of Narrative Theory (Winter 2002).

“Fiction Becomes Her: Representations of Female Character in Mary Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife,” Mary Braddon in Context, eds. Marlene Tromp, Aerin Haynie, and Pamela K. Gilbert. State University of New York Press (2000).

Current Research: 

"Disable the Heroine, Enable the Plot: Dinah Mulock Craik’s Olive and the Triumph of the Least Fit"

“Yellowbacks and Representational Self-Consciousness: Extending Realist Techniques to the Popular Novel”