James Diedrick

Professor Emeritus of English, Agnes Scott College
212 Kings Highway, Decatur, GA 30030 jdiedrick@agnesscott.edu

Books

• Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, University of Virginia Press (2017). Awarded the South Atlantic Modern Language Association award for best monograph of 2017.

• Understanding Martin Amis, University of South Carolina Press (first edition, 1995; revised and expanded edition, 2004).

Edited or co-edited volumes

• Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose, James Diedrick. Modern Humanities Research Association, 2021.

• Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick and the Uses of History, Geoffrey Cocks, James Diedrick, and Glenn Perusek. University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Recent articles

• “Secularism and Its Discontents: Forms of Freethought in Mathilde Blind’s Periodical Poetry.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 23 (Jan. 2025): 131–49.

• “Mary Gladstone: Late-Victorian Hostess, Salonnière—and New Woman.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (143.1): 1-21.

• “Mathilde Blind’s (Proto-) New Women.” The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies 9 (Winter 2017/18). http://www.thelatchkey.org/Latchkey9/essay/Diedrick.htm.

• “‘The Hectic Beauty of Decay’: Positivist Decadence in Mathilde Blind’s Late Poetry.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 631-648.

Recent chapters and entries in books

• “Rough Crossings: The Transatlantic Fate of Pennell’s Life of Mary Wollstonecraft.” In Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays, ed. Dave Buchanan and Kimberly Morse Jones (University of Edinburgh Press, 2021), pp. 33-63.

Recent conference papers

• “Art Against Acceleration: Mathilde Blind’s ‘Manchester by Night’ (1881) and Ford Madox Brown’s ‘John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, A.D. 1753’ (1888).” Conference for Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS), 18-20 June 2025, Genoa, Italy.

• “A Place for Atheist Aestheticism: Mathilde Blind’s Periodical Poetry.” Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Annual Conference, University of Stirling, 13-15 June 2024.

• “Late-Century Freethought: Philosophical Naturalism in Friedrich Nietzsche and Mathilde Blind.” Freethought in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Perspectives, Queen Mary University Mile End, 9 September 2022.

• “Gladstone’s New Women.” North American Victorian Studies Association (Virtual Conference), 3 March 2022.

–February 2026