Jessica Valdez

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University

Biography

Jessica R. Valdez is an assistant professor of nineteenth-century British literature at Louisiana State University, which she joined after teaching at the University of East Anglia, UK, and the University of Hong Kong. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century British literature, novelistic form, empire and migration, and media and periodical studies.

Her first book, Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel (EUP 2020), examined competing understandings of national identity in nineteenth-century novels and the newspaper press, concluding with Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill’s portrayal of the Anglo-Jewish press in his 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto. Plotting the News argued that Victorian novelists functioned as early media theorists, thinking through the overlapping systems of reality offered by newspapers and novels.

She is currently working on a book-length project tentatively called, “Despots and Democrats: China and America in British Literature, 1832-1901,” that examines intersecting imaginaries of the United States and China in nineteenth-century British writing. This research investigates the paradoxical linkage of despotism with democracy, majority rule, and the “people” in nineteenth-century British literature. British writers saw the United States alternately as a land of democratic promise and as a country ruled by despotic majority. China, on the other hand, was seen as timeless and unchanging, what John Stuart Mill called the “despotism of Custom.” This project hypothesizes that British writers navigated debates about democracy by blurring together conceptual opposites: figures of Asian despotism and American democracy.

Area(s) of Interest

Nineteenth-century British literature; empire, colonialism, and migration; media and periodical studies; the nineteenth-century novel