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Janine Barchas

Janine Barchas

Chancellor's Council Centennial Professor in the Book Arts

Ph.D., 1995, University of Chicago

512-471-8379

CAL 203

campus mail code: B5000

office hours: by appointment (send her an email)

    Interests

    Eighteenth-century literature and culture; digital humanities; the British novel; book history; textual studies; and Jane Austen.

    Websites

      Professor Janine Barchas (Stanford B.A. and Chicago Ph.D.) combines book history with literary criticism in both her research and teaching, favoring a "material turn" when it comes to literary texts and their context.  

      Born in the Netherlands, Barchas joined the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, after teaching at the University of Auckland in New Zealand for five years.  She has twice been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and received the Alpha of Texas Award for Distinction in Teaching from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She recently returned from a year's leave in the UK, where she enjoyed back-to-back Visiting Fellowships at Cambridge (Clare Hall) and Oxford (All Souls College) Universities.

      BOOKS

      Her first book, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge UP, 2003), won the SHARP prize for best work in the field of book history.  This was followed by Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012). The Lost Books of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) investigated the famous author's early reception history through the lens of her cheapest, least authoritative, and most neglected reprintings. She describes that project as "hard-core bibliography meets the Antiques Roadshow." You can find reviews in the NYT, WashPost, Guardian, TLS, and Austin Chronicle

      EXHIBITIONS

      She is also the creator behind “What Jane Saw,” a website (www.whatjanesaw.org) that offers digital reconstructions of two museum blockbusters attended by Jane Austen: the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in 1796 and the Sir Joshua Reynolds retrospective in 1813.  The initial phase of “What Jane Saw” launched on 24 May 2013, or 200 years to the day that the Austens attended the Reynolds show.  The second phase of the website launched in 2015, on 16 December, Austen's birthday. If you would like to “hear” Professor Barchas talk about this project, the Folger Shakespeare Library hosts a 30-min podcast called Recreating the Boydell Gallery.

      In 2016, she co-curated with Kristina Straub (Carnegie Mellon Univ) "Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity", an exhibition hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.  Their museum exhibition tracked the parallel afterlives of arguably the two most popular authors in the English language, asking how exactly they became celebrated as literary superheroes.  You can "see" Barchas and Straub talk about "Will & Jane" and catch a glimpse of their exhibition in a 5-min short on YouTube.  The New York Times praised their exhibition for mixing "deep scholarship with serious whimsy."

      In 2019, Barchas curated the “Austen in Austin” exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center, gathering together all their copies of Jane Austen's works to ask how the holding of a single author might reveal the prides and prejudices of book collecting. Labels explained how the Ransom Center acquired its first editions, its unique family and association copies, and its other Janeite items.  “Austen in Austin” extended the argument made in Lost Books by showing how only certain categories of books find a safe haven at scholarly libraries.


      TRANSLATION

      She translated into English her father's Dutch memoirs about growing up during World War II: A Boyhood Under Nazi Occupation (Edward Everett Root, April 2020).  A 5-min book trailer explains that unusual family project.

      LATEST PROJECT

      Barchas is working with London-based illustrator Isabel Greenberg on The Novel Life of Jane Austen: a graphic biography, which is in production at Quercus/Hachette for release in April 2025. 

      SELECTED BITS

      In addition to books, Barchas has published academic articles in journals such as ELH, Review of English Studies, Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Nineteenth-Century LiteraturePersuasions, and Modern Philology. She also writes pieces for the popular press, including essays in the New York TimesWashington Post, Lit Hub, and Los Angeles Review of Books.  Below is a range of fun things:

       

      E 371C • Early Celebrity Culture

      36160 • Spring 2025
      Meets MW 8:30AM-10:00AM

      E 392M • Book History

      36280 • Spring 2025
      Meets F 9:00AM-12:00PM

      E 327 • British Novel In 18th Century

      35085 • Fall 2024
      Meets TTH 9:30AM-11:00AM

      UGS 303 • Jane Austen On Page And Screen

      62205-62230 • Fall 2024
      Meets TTH 8:00AM-9:30AM

      E 350M • The Scriblerians: Honors

      35750 • Spring 2023
      Meets TTH 11:00AM-12:30PM

      E 371C • Early Celebrity Culture

      35845 • Spring 2023
      Meets TTH 8:00AM-9:30AM

      II Wr

      LAH 350 • The Scriblerians

      30885 • Spring 2023
      Meets TTH 11:00AM-12:30PM

      UGS 303 • Jane Austen On Page And Screen

      62930-62940 • Fall 2022
      Meets TTH 9:30AM-11:00AM

      E 327 • British Novel In 18th Century

      35635 • Spring 2022
      Meets TTH 12:30PM-2:00PM

      E 349S • Jane Austen

      35695 • Spring 2022
      Meets TTH 9:30AM-11:00AM

      E 327 • British Novel In 18th Cen-Wb

      36090 • Spring 2021
      Meets MW 8:30AM-10:00AM

      E 371C • Early Celebrity Culture-Wb

      36245 • Spring 2021
      Meets MW 11:30AM-1:00PM

      E 349S • Jane Austen-Wb

      34985 • Fall 2020
      Meets TTH 12:30PM-2:00PM

      UGS 303 • Jane Austen On Page/Screen-Wb

      61200-61225 • Fall 2020
      Meets MW 8:30AM-10:00AM