MyHCHC
Professor Emerita, Literature and History
Ellen Lanzano is the chairperson of the Literature and History program. Her research emphases include the history of nineteenth-century intellectual culture in relation to literary form. As an example of her work, Hardy: The Temporal Poetics (1999) explores the exchange between the quantitative thinking of Victorian Britain and the poetry that Thomas Hardy produced during the last thirty years of his career. Her current book project focuses on the formative influences shaping the concept of the female heroic in the European fiction and poetry of this era.
In teaching, she is a generalist with interests in British literature from the Renaissance to the present time, and in world literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These broader interests, in addition to work in curriculum development, have led to the construction of the new concentration in Literature and History. The program offers students the opportunity to study two uniquely compatible fields in tandem. She is also the co-editor of the Journal of Modern Hellenism.