Nora Gilbert Ph.D.

Nora Gilbert co-specializes in the fields of nineteenth-century British literature and twentieth-century American film, and has served as editor-in-chief of the journal Studies in the Novel since 2017. Her first book, Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship (Stanford University Press, 2013), is a comparative exploration of the paradoxical ways in which the novels written during the Victorian era and films produced under the Production Code were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them, while her second book, Gone Girls, 1684-1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023), argues that the strikingly prevalent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of 'home' played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. She is also coeditor, with Diana Bellonby and Tara MacDonald, of the forthcoming essay collection Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice (SUNY Press, 2026), and is working on a third monograph that she's provisionally calling Unwomaned!: Classical Hollywood Stardom and the Threat of Female Independence. Her work has appeared in such publications as PMLA, Screen, Film & History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Eighteenth-Century Life, JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory, L'Atalante: Revista de Estudios Cinematográficos, Avidly, Public Books, and a number of edited collections. Dr. Gilbert enjoys teaching classes that cover a broad range of topics related to British literature and culture, American film and television, and gender and sexuality studies, and is honored to be the recipient of a number of teaching awards, including the English department's Kesterson Award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching, the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences' Advisory Board Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and UNT's university-wide President's Council Teaching Award.