Elizabeth Starr
Professor

Biography

Elizabeth Starr specializes in 19th-century British literature, narrative theory, and narrative medicine. She teaches courses on the novel, British literature, the health humanities, and writing.

Her literary scholarship has focused on the way 19th-century novels project authors and narrators onto urban industrial landscapes and place writing within debates about the status of labor and profession. Her current research centers on illness narratives, the fictional and non-fictional accounts of people who have experienced disruptions to health and well-being. She draws on the field of rhetorical narratology, which is interested in how narratives communicate things to audiences, to focus on techniques used by writers to provide accounts of particularly difficult experiences to varied groups of readers.

Education

  • Ph.D. in English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001

  • M.A. in English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1995

  • B.A. in English, University of Houston, 1992

  • Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University, 2026

Courses Taught

  • English 101 - Composition I: Rhetoric and Inquiry

  • English 212 - Exploring British Literature since 1780

  • English 298 - Health Stories

  • English 300 - Development of the Novel

  • English 311 - The British Novel

  • English 319 - Victorian Literature

  • English 601 - Studies in Victorian Literature (Graduate Seminar)

Publications

"’A widely applicable model’: Teaching Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay.” Co-authored with Sarah Hardy; with contributions from Cindie Maagaard, Shena McAuliffe, Erin McConnell, and Krista Quesenberry. The Journal of Medical Humanities 44 (2023): 431-453.

“Manufacturing Novels: Charles Dickens on the Hearth in Coketown.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51.3 (2009): 317-340.

“‘A Great Engine for Good’: the Industry of Fiction in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South.” Studies in the Novel. 34.4 (2002): 385-402.

“‘Influencing the Moral Taste’: Literary Work, Aesthetics, and Social Change in Felix Holt, the Radical.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 56.1 (2001): 52-75.