Dr Jordan Kistler

Lecturer

English

Personal statement

I joined Strathclyde as a lecturer in English in 2019. My research interests are in 19^thcentury literature, with specific interests in Victorian poetry, literature and science, museum studies, and Gothic fiction.

I gained my BA from New York University (USA), my MA from York University (CA), and my PhD from King's College, University of London.

I am happy to supervise students on any topics related to Victorian literature or the Gothic, including within literature and science, museum studies, decadence and aestheticism, women's health in nineteenth-century literature, the senses in literature, travel and empire writing, and monstrosity.

Publications

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Publications

Facts and fictions : emotional authenticity and narrative in natural history exhibitions: Kistler Jordan; Museum & Society (2025)
Eclectic collections : un-disciplining the museum: Kistler Jordan, Tattersdill Will; Museum Worlds (2025)
Formulating the novella : genre and the significance of detail: Kistler Jordan; Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (2024)
Walter Pater and non-Darwinian science: Kistler Jordan; Journal of Victorian Culture Vol 28, pp. 163-177 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac080
Walter Pater's museological gaze: Kistler Jordan; Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2022)
'I cannot tell you all the story' : narrative, historical knowledge, and the museum in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine: Kistler Jordan; Configurations Vol 30, pp. 257-283 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0017

More publications

Teaching

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Teaching

My teaching spans the nineteenth century, and focuses on poetry, gender, and the Victorian Gothic.

Research

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Research Interests

I have recently published on the intersections between museums and literature in the nineteenth century and nineteenth-century understandings of non-Darwinian evolutionary theory.

the intersections between Victorian science and fin de siècle decadent literature, the representations of women in late-Victorian Gothic fiction, and the depiction of blindness in nineteenth-century poetry.

My first monograph, Arthur O’Shaughnessy: A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (Routledge, 2016), explored O’Shaughnessy’s contributions to the Victorian medieval revival, Pre-Raphaelitism, decadence, and aestheticism. O’Shaughnessy’s work as a taxonomist in the British Museum is foregrounded in this study to suggest new ways of thinking about the relationship between science and literature during this period, through the lens of a technician rather than a theoretician.

My current project is a wide-ranging cultural history of the 19^th-century British Museum. As an interdisciplinary, public, and national museum, the British Museum offers a unique lens through which to consider key questions of 19^th-century epistemology: How can one ‘know’ from what one sees? How is knowledge organized? Who has access to it? How does this shape public perceptions of class, gender, and nationality? The project explores major changes in the popular conception of history, education, and knowledge itself, across disciplinary boundaries.

I have also published on the intersections between Victorian science and fin de siècle decadent literature, the representations of women in late-Victorian Gothic fiction, and the depiction of blindness in nineteenth-century poetry.