Assistant Professor of English
Kira Braham joined the Lycoming English faculty in 2023. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Global Anglophone literatures, labor history and politics, working-class literatures, gender and sexuality studies, science fiction, and utopian studies.
Her current book project, “The Active Life: Victorian Work Ethics and Literary Labor Politics,” challenges the common understanding of work ethics as disciplinary mechanisms that produce docile capitalist subjects. Exploring a wide variety of Victorian fiction and nonfiction prose, the book exhibits the potential of work ethics to problematize exploitative labor conditions and articulate alternatives for a more equitable organization of human productivity. “Active Life” embraces a presentist approach, placing Victorian authors like George Eliot and George Gissing in conversation with a twenty-first century discourse on the future of work. The book ultimately contends that Victorian conceptions of the meaning and value of work, far from being anachronistic, may prove a vital intellectual resource for reimagining labor politics in the twenty-first century. Material related to the manuscript-in-progress has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Literature Compass, and The Gissing Journal.
In addition to her published essays, she has also published a peer-reviewed lesson plan on Mary Seacole with the digital humanities project Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, which works to disrupt disciplinary boundaries between Victorian Studies and Black, African, Indigenous and Native American, Asian and Asian American, Latinx, Postcolonial, Decolonial, Feminist, Queer, Transgender, Disability, and Critical Ethnic Studies. To learn more, please visit https://undiscipliningvc.org/.