Faculty and Staff

Education

• Ph.D. in English Literature from University of Notre Dame (2001)
• B.A. in English Literature from North Carolina State University (1993)

Research Interests

Victorian literature and culture; science and literature; the Gothic; Victorian periodicals; visual culture; Japanese manga and anime; Aestheticism and Decadence and their afterlives; transnational neo-Victorianism

Recent Research Activities

Anna Maria Jones teaches courses in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture, literary theory, history of the novel, modern British literature, and Japanese manga and anime. All of her research, Victorian and neo-Victorian, is concerned with the many-faceted, and often vexed, ways that readers engage with narrative and visual texts and with the ways that these texts invite readers to reimagine the boundaries of self and other. She is particularly interested in works that explore (and challenge) the intersecting conventions of gender and genre. Dr. Jones's book, Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self, was published in the Ohio State University Press’s Victorian Critical Interventions series in 2007. She is co-editor, with Rebecca N. Mitchell, of Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts (Ohio University Press). Her articles have focused on eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Gothic novels, William Godwin's Caleb Williams and Richard Marsh's The Beetle, on Toboso Yana's neo-Victorian Gothic manga, Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler) and manga adaptations of A. C. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and on the short-lived Victorian monthly magazine, Dark Blue (1871–73), among other topics. Her current research explores transnational and transmedial engagements with and appropriations of nineteenth-century Aestheticism. Formerly director of graduate studies for the Department of English, she also served as director of What's Next: Integrative Learning for Professional and Civic Preparation (2016–21), UCF's Quality Enhancement Plan, a university-wide five-year initiative to prepare undergraduates to achieve their professional goals and to be engaged, empowered citizens. She co-edits Prose Studies, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of nonfiction prose in all historical and contemporary contexts.

---

Selected Publications

Books

• Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts. Edited with Rebecca N. Mitchell. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2017.
• Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007. Excerpt reprinted in Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates, ed. Lee Behlman and Anne Longmuir (Routledge, 2015).

Articles/Essays

•  “Transnational Neo-Victorian Studies: Notes on the Possibilities and Limitations of a Discipline.” Literature Compass (2018): 1–18. DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12461.
• “On the Publication of Dark Blue, 1871–73.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. (published 2015) 
• "Palimpsestuous' Attachments: Framing a Manga Theory of the Global Neo-Victorian." Neo-Victorianism and Globalism: Transnational Dissemination of Nineteenth-Century Cultural Texts. Ed. Antonija Primorac and Monika Pietrzak-Franger. Spec. issue of Neo-Victorian Studies 8.1 (2015): 17–47. 
• "The Victorian Childhood of Manga: Toward a Queer Theory of the Child in Toboso Yana's Kuroshitsuji." Criticism 55.1 (Winter 2013): 1–41.
• “‘What should make thee inaccessible to my fury?’: Gothic Self-Possession, Revenge, and the Doctrine of Necessity in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams.” European Romantic Review 22.2 (2011): 137–54.
• “Conservation of Energy, Individual Agency, and Gothic Terror in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, or, What’s Scarier than an Ancient, Evil, Shape-shifting Bug?” Victorian Literature and Culture 39.1 (2011): 65–85.
• “‘A Track to the Water’s Edge’: Learning to Suffer in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 26.2 (Fall 2007): 217–43.
• “Eugenics by Way of Aesthetics: Sexual Selection, Cultural Consumption, and the Cultivated Reader in The Egoist.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 16.1 (2005): 101–28.
• “‘A Victim in Search of a Torturer’: Reading Masochism in Wilkie Collins’s No Name.” Novel 33.2 (2000): 196–211.

Book Sections/Chapters

• Forthcoming

  “Neo-Victorian Graphic Novels: Learning to Unmaster the Archive.” In Handbook of Neo-Victorian Studies, edited by Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres. London: Palgrave MacMillan (8000 words; in press).
  

• “The Art of Novel Writing: Victorian Theories.” In Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900, edited by Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. 107–120.
• "Picturing 'girls who read': Victorian Governesses and Neo-Victorian Shōjo Manga.” Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts. Ed. Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2017. 300–330.
• “Inductive Science, Literary Theory, and the Occult in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s ‘Suggestive’ Epistemological System.” Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age. Ed. Shalyn Claggett and Lara Karpenko. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. 215–30.
• “Sheridan Le Fanu.” A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. Pamela K. Gilbert. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. 269–80.
• “Victorian Literary Theory" Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 236–54.

Book Reviews

• Rev. of Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction, by Helena Ifill. English Studies 101.3 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2020.1756581
• Rev. of On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights in Japan, by Judith Pascoe. Victorian Studies 61.3 (spring 2019): 500–503.
• Rev. of Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel, by Anne DeWitt. Nineteenth-Century Prose 42.2 (2015): 354–59.
• Rev. of Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science, by George Levine. Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth Century Writing, 1790-1914 1.1 (2011): 126–27.
• Rev. of Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction, by Garrett Stewart. Nineteenth-Century Literature 65.2 (2010): 253–56.
• “Not the Same Old Masochism.” Rev. of Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class, by John Kucich. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 42.1 (Spring 2008). http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue41/issue41.htm

Conference Papers/Presentations

• “Online Teaching Strategies for Victorianists (and Others): Moving from Crisis to Intentionality.” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Virtual Roundtable. August 2020.
• "Purple Prose: Sex, Violence, and Japonisme in Angela Carter's Post-Decadence Fiction." North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Columbus, Ohio, October 2019.
• “Aestheticism’s Children: The Child as Beautiful Object and Uncanny Consumer in Transnational Neo-Victorianism,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, January 2019.
• “Synesthesia, Sex, and Violence: Decadent Aesthetics in Angela Carter’s ‘Moral Pornography’.” Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS) Conference, Palm Springs, California, November 2018
• “Memory/Influence.” Novel Theory: Biennial Conference of the Society for Novel Studies. Cornell University, May 2018.
• “Decadence Curiously Reprised: Arthur Rackham’s Illustrations of A. C. Swinburne’s Child Poems.” Curiosity and Desire in Fin-de-Siècle Art and Literature Conference, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, May 2018.
• “‘European, Japanese, Hybrid, or what?’: The Comparison Aesthetics of Yoshio Markino and Yone Noguchi.” MLA Working Group “Literature, Aesthetics, and Cultural Exchange between East Asia and Southeast Asian and Britain and North America in the Long Nineteenth Century,” co-organized with Ross Forman and Elizabeth Chang, MLA Annual Convention, New York, January 2018.
• “Serial Romance: Reading the Victorian Marriage Plot in Neo-Victorian Manga.” “Revisiting the Marriage Plot” Roundtable. Twenty-Fifth Annual Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Conference, Chapel Hill, NC, June 2017.
• "After 'The Final Problem': The Case of the Transnational, Supernatural Sherlock Holmes." NAVSA Supernumerary Conference, Florence Italy, May 2017.
• “Yoshio Markino in London: Performing Bushido Performing Anglophilia at the End of Empire.” NAVSA Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, November 2016.
• "Memory, Mimicry, and Mastery in Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans: Pip Meets Sherlock in Shanghai, 1937." 21st Annual Dickens Symposium: Dickens and Adaptation. Reykjavik, Iceland, July, 2016.
• "Fashioning Children and Other Beautiful Things in A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book." VISAWUS Victorian Studies Association of the Western United States, Denver, Colorado, October 2015.
• “Beautiful Boys, Sensational Readers, and the Aesthetics of Neo-Victorian Manga.” Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, October 2015.
• "Alice's Global Afterlives: Persistent Attachments and Anxious Erasures in Neo-Victorian Graphic Appropriations of Alice in Wonderland." MLA Special Session, "Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Sites of Memory." Presented at MLA 2015 Convention, Vancouver, BC, January 2015.
• "Synaesthesia and Tezuka's Beardsley: Entangled Arts, Queer Subjects, and the Transnational Afterlife of Aestheticism." Presented at NAVSA 2014 Conference, London, Ontario, November 2014.
• "Persistent Ephemera in a Transnational Marketplace: Reflecting on the Short Life and Neo-Victorian Afterlife of The Dark Blue." Presented at VISAWUS Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States Conference, Portland, Oregon, 2013.
• Roundtable Discussion of "The Victorian Childhood of Manga: Toward a Queer Theory of the Child in Toboso Yana's Kuroshitsuji," Studies in Sexualities Program, Emory University, September 2013.
• "Neo-Victorian Serials on Victorian Serials, or Lady Victorian Reads the Victorian Lady Reader." Presented at NAVSA North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, 2012.
• “Masochistic Contracts, Bishōnen, and the Rejection of Futurity: How to Read Manga like a Victorian.” Presented at the 127th Annual MLA Convention, Seattle, Washington, 2012.
• "From Universal Law to Universal Love: Natural Law and Necessitarianism in Harriet Martineau's Radical Ethics of 'Unindividualism'." Presented at the 26th Annual INCS Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Claremont, California, 2011.
• “Self-Possession: Toward a Gothic Theory of Liberalism.” The CUNY Annual Victorian Conference: Victorian Theory?, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, New York, May 2010.
• “Performative Femininity Meets Powerful Agency in Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks, or, When is a Gothic Villainess not a Gothic Villainess?” Thirty-first Annual NCSA Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference, Tampa, Florida, March 2010.
• “‘What should make thee inaccessible to my fury?’: Theorizing Fantasies and Phobias of Revenge in Caleb Williams.” PHOBIA: Constructing the Phenomenology of Chronic Fear, 1789–Present Conference, Cardiff, Wales, 2009.
• “Self-Help, Revenge, and the Rights of Mannion in Wilkie Collins’s Basil.” Presented at the 23rd Annual INCS Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2008.
• “The Progress of Revenge in The Beetle, or, What’s Scarier than an Ancient, Evil, Shape-shifting Bug?” Presented at the 22nd Annual INCS Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Kansas City, Missouri, 2007.
• “Inscrutable Revenge, or, the Psychopathology of Capitalism in Victorian Sensation Fiction.” Presented at the International Conference on Narrative, Washington, D.C., 2007.
• “Introducing...Theory: Teaching Literary Theory to Undergraduates.” Presented at the SAMLA Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, November 2005.
• “Ambivalent Agency: The Militant Suffragette, The Swan, and the Tortured Body as a Site of Self-(Mis)Recognition.” Presented at [CTRL]: Controlling Bodies/Controlling Spaces Conference, Montreal, Quebec, 2004.
• “‘This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard’: Modernism’s Melancholia and the Loss of the Domestic in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Presented at the International Conference on Narrative, Berkeley, California, 2003.
• “‘Now I wanna be your dog’: Bestial Constructions of Interracial Homoerotic Desire, and the Anti-Bildungsroman in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale.” Presented at the 18th Annual INCS Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Santa Cruz, California, 2003.
• “Eugenics by Way of Aesthetics: Sexual Selection and Cultural Consumption in George Meredith’s The Egoist.” Presented at the Northeastern Modern Language Association (NEMLA), Boston, Massachusetts, 2003.
• “Narrative Degeneration: Realism, Sexual Selection and the Death of Desire in George Meredith’s The Egoist.” Presented at the International Conference on Narrative, East Lansing, Michigan, 2002.

Miscellaneous Publications

• Response to Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan, by Grace E. Lavery. V21 Collective Collations Book Forum, August 2020.
• "Le Fanu, Sheridan." Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga, Linda K. Hughes, and Pamela K. Gilbert. Oxford: Blackwell, 2015.
• "On Revenge." Preface. Revenge. Ed. Dorothy Butchard and Barbara Vrachnas. Spec. issue of FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts 13 (2011). n. pag. Web. http://www.forumjournal.org/site/issue/13

Awards

• UCF Research Incentive Award (RIA), 2019.
• UCF Teaching Incentive Program (TIP) Award, 2006, 2011, 2016.
• Seminar Leader, NEH Summer Seminar, "Victorians Today: Encountering the Global Afterlives of the British Empire," Potsdam, NY, 2015.
• Participant, Freeman Summer Institute in Japan Studies, 2011.
• Participant, National Humanities Center Summer Institute in Literary Studies, 2010.
• UCF Women's Research Center Award in the Arts and Humanities, 2010.
• UCF Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, Faculty Fellow, 2010-12.
• UCF Competitive Sabbatical, 2010.
• UCF In-House Grant, 2006.

Courses

• Fall 2025
• Summer 2025
• Spring 2025