Department
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Dr. Amanda Auerbach is Assistant Professor of English at Catholic University. She joined the faculty in fall 2020. Dr. Auerbach specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, taking a particular interest in women novelists.
Dr. Auerbach’s book, Getting Lost in the Novel: Strategic Confusion in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Getting Lost attends to moments when characters become lost, often moved by overwhelming emotion. The emotions that move characters most powerfully often relate to their psychological needs, which the social conditions of their lives prevent them from meeting or fully acknowledging. These episodes appear across multiple novels in multiple subgenres, including the marriage plot, the Gothic novel, the Victorian Bildungsroman, and the sensation novel. These episodes collectively reveal how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelistic subgenres developed to help women and working-class readers covertly satisfy their psychological needs.
Her academic articles have appeared in European Romantic Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, Brontë Studies, The Thomas Hardy Journal, and Literary Imagination.
In addition to writing literary criticism, Dr. Auerbach is also a poet; her book of poems, What Need Have We For Such as We, was published in fall 2019 by C&R Press. Her poems have also appeared in literary magazines including the Paris Review and The Kenyon Review.
Her academic articles have appeared in European Romantic Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, Brontë Studies, The Thomas Hardy Journal, and Literary Imagination.
In addition to writing literary criticism, Dr. Auerbach is also a poet; her book of poems, What Need Have We For Such as We, was published in fall 2019 by C&R Press. Her poems have also appeared in literary magazines including the Paris Review and The Kenyon Review.
Dr. Auerbach has taught courses on the love plot, Gothic fiction, and the
creative writing of poetry and fiction.
Dr. Auerbach earned her PhD in English at Harvard University in May 2018. She completed her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in May 2020.