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.
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 Literature, Persuasions, and Modern Philology. She also writes pieces for the popular press, including essays in the New York Times, Washington Post, Lit Hub, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Below is a range of fun things:
- Youtube video: Austen Chat! "Cassandra Austen and Her Drawings" (6 Sept 2024)
- Noiser podcast "Short History of Jane Austen" (23 Oct 2023)
- Article: “Jane Austen, the Artful Tax Dodger,” Los Angeles Review of Books (16 Dec 2021)
- Article: “Jane Austen, Gritty Educational Reformer of the Working Class,” on Literary Hub(4 Feb 2020)
- Podcast: “Janine Barchas on The Lost Books of Jane Austen,” interview with Russ Roberts for EconTalk.(Jan 2020)
- Article: “‘We’ll buy you a harpoon Lydia’: How Arthur Miller adapted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,” Los Angeles Review of Books(28 Nov 2019)
- Review: “When You Can’t Afford A Jane Austen Original,” New York Times(19 Nov 2019)
- “The Prides and Prejudices of Book Collecting,” Los Angeles Review of Books (31 Oct 2019)
- Interview: “Janine Barchas: Jane Austen for the People,” with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand (17 August 2019)
- Cheeky article: “Marie Kondo’s Contributions to the Reception History of Jane Austen,” Los Angeles Review of Books(9 April 2019)
- Cheeky Op-Ed for Washington Post: “Jane Austen is a Fraud” (18 July 2017)
- Serious Op-Ed for Washington Post, “Will & Jane: making literary celebrity work for the humanities,”co-authored with Kristina Straub (27 Oct 2016)
- Youtube video of Will & Jane exhibition (24 Aug 2016)
- New York Times coverage of curated “Will & Jane” exhibition (4 Aug. 2016)
- Interview: “Recreating the Boydell Gallery,” with Barbara Bogaev for Folger Shakespeare Library (12 July 2016)
- Youtube promo of collaboration with VisLab at Texas Advanced Computing Center (18 Dec 2015)
- New York Timesstory on digital reconstruction of Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (17 Dec 2015)
- New York Timesfeature on the launch of What Jane Saw(25 May 2013)
- Article: “This is Himmler’s Copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf,”com(3 June 2015)
- Backpager essay in New York Times Book Review(17 Feb 2013)