David Hanson, M.A., Ph.D.

Dr. David Hanson is professor of English and head of the Department of English and World Languages. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. His teaching and research are centered in British art and literature of the nineteenth century, particularly the work of the art and social critic, John Ruskin. He formerly edited and now serves as consulting editor for Nineteenth Century Studies, the journal of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. He is presently editing a digital archive, The Early Ruskin Manuscripts, and is active in the International Society of Literary Juvenilia. Articles have appeared in The Journal of Juvenilia Studies, Modern Philology, Nineteenth Century Literature, Nineteenth Century Prose, Studies in Romanticism, Text, Victorian Literature and Culture, and the collections Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, edited by Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison, and The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. Awards include two President’s Awards from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association; the Southeastern President’s Award for Excellence in Artistic Activity, for editorship of Louisiana Literature; and the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award. Major grants include fellowships at the Beinecke Library and at the Huntington Library; the Louisiana Board of Regents Atlas Grant; the Leola Purcell Endowed Professorship in English; four Louisiana Board of Regents Undergraduate Program Enhancement grants (principal investigator); and additional grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, Bibliographical Society of America, South Central Modern Language Association, and Southeastern Louisiana University.

Area of Expertise

Interrelation of literature and visual art; juvenilia; autobiography; travel writing ; digital humanities; bibliography and textual criticism; nineteenth-century British literature and culture.