Dr. Thomas Vranken

Position title: Lecturer in Literary Studies

Contact Info

Phone #: +679 323 1026
Office location: SPACE building, Room 319
Email: thomas.vranken@usp.ac.fj

Qualifications: PhD (Melbourne)

Expertise: Literature and Technology; Nineteenth-Century Literature; Popular Fiction

BIOGRAPHY

Thomas Vranken joined USP in 2022. He completed his doctorate at the University of Melbourne (2017), and a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of British Columbia (2019-2021). His research explores literature’s relationship with technology, the materiality of books, adventure fiction, and the place of Pacific literature in an interconnected nineteenth-century world. He welcomes inquiries from students looking to do graduate research in any of these areas, or in literary studies more generally.

PUBLICATIONS

Books

Simulating Antiquity in Boys’ Adventure Fiction: Maps and Ink Stains (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation (Routledge, 2019).

Edited Collections

Thomas Vranken and Suzy Anger eds., Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, in press).

Book Chapters

‘‘‘A Well-Preserved Piece of Useless Antiquity’: The Gentleman’s Magazine and Anti-Emotional National Identity’’, in Jock Macleod, William Christie, Peter Denney eds., Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Journal Contributions

‘‘‘A Medium More Important than Bodily Sense’: Wilde, the Antipodes, and the
Techno-Imagination’’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 4.1 (2021).

‘‘‘Oscar Wilde’s Book’’: Early American Reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray’, PMLA 133.1 (2018).

‘‘From Copying to Originality in Tit-Bits’’, Victorian Periodicals Review 51.4 (2018).

‘‘A Century’s Worth of Huckleberry Finn: Commerce, Property, and Slavery in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine’’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 40.2 (2018).

‘‘‘Look at This Map’: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Use of Diegetic Illustrations in The Return of Sherlock Holmes’’, Clues: A Journal of Detection 35.1 (2017).

‘‘The Public, the Press, and Celebrities in The Return of Sherlock Holmes’’, Authorship 4.2 (2015).