Professor Tina Lupton
Professor Lupton's distinguished scholarship brings the rigor and historical depth of 18th-century literary studies to bear on contemporary media theory, establishing the history of reading as an indispensable framework for current work in media studies.
Professor Lupton is the author of several monographs and editor of numerous scholarly collections. Her award-winning first book, Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), examines how 18th-century British authors employed metafictional techniques to foreground the materiality and technological dimensions of the book as object. Reading and the Making of Time in the Age of British Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) challenges contemporary assumptions about distracted reading by demonstrating that 18th-century readers navigated similar temporal constraints, advancing an argument about reading's capacity to constitute temporality through non-linear practices. Her co-authored Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford University Press, 2022), awarded the 2022 British Association for Contemporary Literature Monograph Prize, employs sociological methodologies to investigate reading practices during lockdown, illuminating how encounters with reading technologies shape literary interpretation.
Professor Lupton has edited several volumes, including the Oxford World's Classics edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and journal special issues including "Latour and the Eighteenth Century" for The Eighteenth Century. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her creative nonfiction work, Love and the Novel: Life After Reading (2022), received wide critical acclaim.
A scholar of exceptional range, Professor Lupton brings expertise in 18th-century literary studies, contemporary reading practices, book history, media theory, and literary sociology to the department.