Former Comp Lit graduate student, Carolyn Vellenga Berman ’00, PhD, has shared with CompLit@Brown news of her most recent publication. Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper (Oxford University Press) was released in May of 2022. Carolyn writes: “This book argues that Charles Dickens and the British Parliament were engaged in competitive efforts to represent the People in print at a crucial moment in the history of representative democracy—when the British government was under enormous political pressure to expand the franchise beyond a narrow band of male landowners. It shows how Dickens's fiction mocks parliamentary form (as in Pickwick Papers), canvasses the history of parliamentary representation (as in Bleak House), and depicts the relation of the People to the state as well as commerce (as in Little Dorrit). It thus rethinks the history of the Victorian novel by examining its rivalry with Parliament in the expanding world of print publication.”

Carolyn Vellenga Berman is now an Associate Professor of Literature and Co-Chair of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York City. Her previous works include her publication entitled Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (Cornell University Press), as well as various articles appearing in journals such as Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts, to name a few. With a background in historicism and post/colonial studies, Dr. Berman’s research deals with British, French, and US culture and literature of the 19^th century, including print culture, media studies, critical theory, fairy tales, Caribbean literature, ecocriticism, and contemporary fiction.