Video: Distinguished Professor Robyn Warhol Talks: Feminist Narrative Theory
Podcast: Project Narrative Podcast Episode 3: Robyn Warhol & Jim Phelan — Zadie Smith’s “The Waiter’s Wife”

Robyn Warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. After 26 years on the faculty at the University of Vermont, she joined Ohio State as a core faculty member of Project Narrative in 2009. She was Director of Project Narrative from 2010-2012.  

As a feminist narratologist, Warhol studies the interrelations between gender and narrative forms. She is known among feminist scholars as the co-editor (with Diane Price Herndl) of Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (1991, 1997) and its successor, Feminisms Redux (2009). Among other publications, Warhol has written Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Popular Forms (Ohio State UP, 2003), a study of the ways sentimental, romantic, and serial texts work to establish and reinforce gendered performance in fans of long-form TV series, Hollywood film, and Victorian and contemporary serial fiction and Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Rutgers UP, 1989), an early work of feminist narratology which explicates her model of the “engaging narrator.” More recently she has been working on the construction of fictional space in Dickens’s Bleak House, on the “reality effects” in mockumentaries like NBC’s The Office and in so-called reality-TV shows such as The Real Housewives series, and on the relationship between serial form and representations of addiction and alcoholism on long-form TV series.  She and Susan S. Lanser of Brandeis University have just finished co-editing a volume, Narrative 2.0: Queer and Feminist Narrative Theories, described by external readers as a field-defining book. It is coming out in 2015 from the Ohio State University Press. With co-author Helena Michie of Rice University, she is also doing final revisions on a work of “meta-archival biography,” Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor. In recent years she has been a Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study and an Einstein Fellow at the Free University of Berlin’s Kennedy Institute for North American Studies.

Learn more about Warhol's current research