white woman with brown hair wearing a teal cardigan

Professor Karen Bourrier

Pronouns: she / her

Positions

Contact information

Background

Educational Background

B.A. English Lang & Or Literature, Queen's University, 2003

Doctor of Philosophy English Lang & Or Literature, Cornell University, 2009

Master of Studies English Lang & Or Literature, University of Oxford, 2004

Research

Areas of Research

Research Interests

Karen Bourrier is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include nineteenth-century literature and culture, disability studies, the digital humanities, and women’s writing. With Susan Brown (University of Guelph) and Anthony Mandal (University of Cardiff), she is currently writing a narrative history of women’s writing in the long nineteenth-century, based on data from the Orlando Project. She is also at work on a collective biography, tentatively entitled Child-Friend: The Girls and Women who Knew Lewis Carroll, which looks at how the new presence of girls in nineteenth-century Oxford transformed art, literature, and education in tandem with liberal reforms at the ancient university and beyond.

She is the author of The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in mid-Victorian Fiction (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (University of Michigan Press, 2019). Bourrier’s articles have appeared in journals such as Victorian Literature and Culture and Victorian Studies. She is project director of a digital resource peer-reviewed by NINESNineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts. Before coming to the University of Calgary, she was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario and a lecturer in the CAS writing program at Boston University.

Publications