Jonathan Smith

Jonathan Smith photo

Professor of English
Department of Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts
University of Michigan-Dearborn
4901 Evergreen Road
Dearborn, MI 48128
(313) 436-9187
(313) 593-1902 (fax)
e-mail: jonsmith@umich.edu

This home page is really a glorified c.v. I've presented the standard information in the standard way, but I've also included narrative about my research interests and my teaching, and I've constructed links to some of my recent scholarship and teaching materials. I hope this adds a bit more vitae to the curriculum.

Professional Experience ¦ Education ¦ Publications ¦ Works in Progress ¦ Honors and Awards ¦ Grants and Fellowships ¦ Conference Papers and Invited Talks ¦ Teaching ¦ Thesis Advising ¦ Service to the Profession ¦ University Service ¦ Memberships


















Professional Experience:

Education:

Publications:

Books:

  1. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  2. Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Journal Issue:

  1. "Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies." Special Issue of Victorian Studies 51.3 (Spring 2009) (forthcoming).
Website:
  1. The Automobile in American Life and Society: Website and Online Archive. Launched September 2005. I served as project director for this site, which consists of ten scholarly essays, illustrated with archival materials from the collections of The Henry Ford and supplemented with extensive teaching resources and a group of digitized oral histories of major auto industry designers. I directed a team of scholars, archivists, curators, and librarians over a three-year period; edited the essays; and authored all the teaching resources.
Articles:
  1. “Evolutionary Aesthetics and Victorian Visual Culture.” Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts. Ed. Diana Donald. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. 236-51. (In press.)
  2. "Domestic Hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian Fiction, and Darwin's Botany." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 48 (2008): 861-70.
  3. “Gender, Royalty, and Sexuality in John Gould’s Birds of Australia.” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007): 569-87.
  4. "Picturing Sexual Selection: Gender and the Evolution of Ornithological Illustration in Charles Darwin's Descent of Man." Figuring It Out: Visual Languages of Gender in Science. Ed. Bernard Lightman and Ann  B. Shteir. Lebanon, NH: UP of New England, 2006. 85-109.
  5. "Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Dissemination of Darwin's Botany." Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals. Ed. Geoffrey N. Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. 285-306.
  6. "Une Fleur du Mal? Swinburne's 'The Sundew' and Darwin's Insectivorous Plants." Victorian Poetry 41 (2003): 131-50.
  7. "Philip Gosse and the Varieties of Natural Theology." Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Ed. Linda Woodhead. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2001. 251-62.
  8. "Charles Darwin, John Gould, and the Picturing of Natural Selection." The Book Collector 50 (2001): 51-76.
  9. "Darwin's Barnacles, Dickens's Little Dorrit, and the Social Uses of Victorian Seaside Studies." LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 10 (2000): 327-47.
  10. "Is There A Hypertext in This Class?: Teaching Victorian Literature in the Electronic Age." Online. TLWC: Teaching Literature With Computers. (TLWC is now offline, but the article appears here as it did online.)
  11. "A Grammar of Dissent: Flatland, Newman, and the Theology of Probability." Victorian Studies 39 (1996-97): 129-50. (Co-authored with Gerald Baker and Lawrence Berkove, but I am listed first as the primary author.)
  12. "'Fill Up All the Gaps': Narrative and Illegitimacy in The Woman in White." Journal of Narrative Technique 26 (1996): 274-91. (Co-authored with Gwendolyn MacDonagh, one of my undergraduate students.)
  13. "What's All this Hype About Hypertext?: Teaching Literature with George P. Landow's The Dickens Web." Computers and the Humanities 30 (1996): 121-29.
  14. "'The Cock of Lordly Plume': Sexual Selection and The Egoist." Nineteenth-Century Literature 50 (1995-96): 51-77.
  15. "Heat and Modern Thought: The Forces of Nature in Our Mutual Friend." Victorian Literature and Culture 23 (1995): 37-69.
  16. "Art and Science: The Method of Ruskin's Modern Painters." Scientific Methods: Conceptual and Historical Problems. Ed. Peter Achinstein and Laura J. Snyder. Melbourne, FL: Krieger, 1994. 119-36.
  17. "De Quincey's Revisions to 'The System of the Heavens.'" Victorian Periodicals Review 26 (1993): 203-12.
  18. "The 'Wonderful Geological Story': Uniformitarianism and The Mill on the Floss." Papers on Language and Literature 27 (1991): 430-52.
Articles (Under Review):
  1. "The Luckiest Man: A Brief History of Time and The Pride of the Yankees."
  2. "Darwin and the Sensation Novelists."
Reviews and Short Articles:
  1. Review of The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856, by Ralph O’Connor, and Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, by Bernard Lightman. American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1241-42.
  2. Review of The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank, by John Glendening. Victorian Studies 50 (2008):  487-89.
  3. Review of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, ed. John van Wyhe. Journal of Victorian Culture 13.1 (2008): 114-19.
  4. “Darwin and the Aesthetes.” Review of Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability, by Gowan Dawson. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.1 (2008). <http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue41/smith.htm>.
  5. Review of Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, by Joseph Carroll. Victorian Studies 48 (2006): 573-74.
  6. “Elizabeth Gould,” for Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists, ed. Bernard Lightman (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2004).
  7. Review of Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery, by Christopher Herbert. Clio 32 (2003): 222-27.
  8. Review of Charles Darwin: The Life of a Revolutionary Thinker, by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent. Quarterly Review of Biology 77 (2002): 175-76.
  9. Review of Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London, by Iwan Rhys Morus, and Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, by Alison Winter. Nineteenth-Century Prose 28 (2001): 111-13.
  10. Review of Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, by Desmond King-Hele. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 25.1 (2000): 69-71.
  11. Review of Darwinian Myths, by Edward Caudill, and Paul Ekman's edition of Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Nineteenth-Century Prose 27 (2000): 101-04.
  12. "The Cuckoo's Contested History," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14 (1999):  415.
  13. Review of Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science, by Laura Dassow Walls. Annals of Science 55 (1998): 434-35.
  14. Review of Meredith and the Novel, by Neil Roberts. Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 601-03.
  15. Review of G.H. Lewes: A Life, by Rosemary Ashton. Configurations 2 (1994): 365-67.
  16. Review of Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science, by J. Vernon Jensen. Victorian Studies 36 (1992-1993): 248-49.
  17. Review of Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott, ed. Thomas Banchoff. Victorian Studies 36 (1992-1993): 94-95.

Works in Progress:

Honors and Awards:

 Grants and Fellowships:

Conference Papers and Invited Talks: 

Teaching:

My normal teaching load is three courses per semester. I'm responsible for all courses in nineteenth-century British literature, so I teach one upper-level course in the Romantics or the Victorians each semester. As the list below indicates, I've taught a wide variety of nineteenth-century courses, topics courses as well as standard period/genre surveys. My other two courses generally consist of some combination of an introductory literature course (the second half of the English literature survey or Introduction to Drama), a course for one of our interdisciplinary programs (such as our new undergraduate Science and Technology Studies Program or our master's program in Liberal Studies), a topics course in literature (such as Classical Literature in Translation).

My research interests in Literature and Science and Science and Technology Studies have led not only to the creation and teaching of new courses in these areas but to program development. I taught an undergraduate course on Literature and Science in 1993 that I subsquently re-vamped as a graduate seminar on "Literature, Science, and Science Studies" for our master's program in Liberal Studies. In 1991 and 2000 I taught a course I developed on Darwin and Victorian Culture. In 2000 I spearheaded the effort to create a Science and Technology Studies Program at UMD with a special focus on the automobile and automobile industry. With funding from the NEH, we brought together an interdisciplinary group of faculty for reading, discussion, and program design. The STS Program and Minor were approved in early 2002 and launched in the Fall of that year. I designed and taught the inaugural offering of the introductory course for the Program on "The Automobile in American Life and Society." I am currently serving as the Director both of the STS Program and of a second NEH-funded project to create a web site that will accompany the Program but will also be available to teachers and students elsewhere. Working with The Henry Ford, we are constructing a site that includes overview essays and case studies by five distinguished scholars on the automobile and labor, gender, design, the environment, and race. In addition, the site will include a collection of oral histories taken from auto industry designers.

My teaching style in the literature classroom blends Socratic questioning and discussion with individual and small-group activities. I lecture when I feel I need to, but I try to keep it to a minimum. I treat writing assignments as I do in my composition classes: students are required to write rough drafts and to critique the drafts of other students in their peer group. 

For over a decade I have incorporated technology into my literature classes fairly extensively, employing email and bulletin boards for out-of-class discussion, utilizing Web sites in paper assignments and homework exercises, and, in some cases, requiring students to conduct a research project that is conceived hypertextually and becomes part of a class-constructed web on a particular work, with links among the various individual projects. When the Web was in its infancy, I used Storyspace hypertext software and George Landow's Storyspace webs on Great Expectations and In Memoriam. Now these classes build webs directly on the WWW. In 1997, my class on the Victorian Novel launched a web on Bronte's Jane Eyre entitled "Charlotte's Web" and in 1999 the same class used that web as both a resource and a model for their own web, called "Pip's World," on Great Expectations. Classes in 2001, 2003, and 2005 have added to those original webs. For the one in 2007 I moved to a wiki on Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies; that project, however, is not available on the web.

My use of Storyspace is related to another of my pedagogical interests: undergraduate research. I've been actively involved in the annual "Meeting of Minds" conference on undergraduate research held with students from our campus, the University of Michigan-Flint, and Oakland University; I've worked closely with our librarians and Writing Program on ways to enhance research across the curriculum; and I try to work with talented individual students on independent research projects whose goal is national conference presentations and publications. I've directed an NEH-funded student project on alchemy and Frankenstein and presented a paper with the student at the Society for Literature and Science conference, co-authored a journal article on The Woman in White with another, had a third publish an article in ISLE, and have directed roughly a dozen independent study projects. At the graduate level, I directed the Master's Thesis of Carolyn Reese on "Anne Bronte and Universal Salvation," while another student's independent study project resulted in an article on Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe in Public Understanding of Science.

I've been creating web sites for all my courses since 1998. In some cases, particularly when creating an online coursepack, I utilize our library's Electronic Reserves system; these course spaces are password-protected and thus not accessible.

Thesis Advising:

Service to the Profession:

University Service:

English Discipline:

Humanities Department/Department of Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts: College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters: University of Michigan-Dearborn Campus: University of Michigan System:

Memberships: