2026/03/01 by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, Amy R. Wong
paper · doi:10.1632/s0030812926101837
“Undisciplining Victorian Studies” was published five years ago, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the global uprisings that followed the brutal murder of George Floyd. We are grateful to be given the opportunity to consider its afterlife here among other methodological problems that the two essays anchoring this forum pose: the persistence of the field marker “Victorian” and the partial origin of the field of Victorian studies in Cold War American imperialism and class politics. Nonetheless, we found ourselves unmoored by the terms of this feature’s title, “Victorian Studies and Its Others,” lacking the coordinates for the very conversation we wished to have amid personal and professional shifts (motherhood; the neoliberal realities of higher education, including hiring freezes; the collapse of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and the sharp rise of AI), and ongoing global catastrophe (fascism, the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, the retrenchment of capital in a supposedly “post” pandemic landscape). We proceeded by asking one another questions in the collective spirit of the original essay in the hopes of retracing a scholarly thread between then and now.