Virginia Jackson


Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century. Her research includes nineteenth-century American poetry, the history of American poetry, comparative literature, lyric theory, the history of criticism, the history of poetics, and genre theory.
Jackson is the author of the definition of "Lyric" in the most recent edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.. With Yopie Prins, she is the editor of The Lyric Theory Reader.
Jackson studied comparative literature at Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1995. Her dissertation, "The Subject of Lyric: Reading Emily Dickinson," was advised by David Bromwich and A. Walton Litz She taught at Middlebury College, Boston University, Rutgers University, New York University, and Tufts University before accepting the endowed chair at Irvine in 2012. Her first book, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading won both the MLA Prize for a First Book and the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships for her work on the history of American poetry.

Publications

Books