Research interests

Professor  Regenia Gagnier's books and lectures have shaped the study of 19-21C British and anglophone culture with highly influential work on decadence, aesthetics and aestheticism, lifewriting and subjectivity, economics, individualism, globalization and political languages. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public  (Stanford, 1986)  considered the role of the artist in market society.  Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991) analyzed the relationship of social class and gender to literary form.  The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000) traced the moment when aesthetics and economics shifted from substantive to formal models and production to consumption.   Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920  (Palgrave Macmillan 2010)  explored the relation of the individual to increasingly larger social units, from the dyad to the world citizen. Her book on modernization and the global circulation of political languages, Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century (2018) is  published  in the Palgrave series New Comparisons in World Literature. Since 2006 her research has focussed on the global circulation of Anglophone literatures and cultures and the geopolitics of language and literature migration.    

Gagnier is Co-Editor wth Laura Doyle of the Global Circulation Project http://literature-compass.com/global-circulationproject/; associate editor, Feminist Economics; associate editor, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities; Advisory Committee PMLA; editor and advisor COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education); editorial advisor  to Women: A Cultural Review; and on the editorial boards of Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Partial Answers, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long 19C, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Kritika Kultura, Modern Turkish Literature, and RaVoN (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net).

 Gagnier has won numerous awards and fellowships for teaching as well as research in Britain, Australasia, Europe,  North America, and South Africa.  She has served on seven MLA Division Executive Committees in the USA; the AHRC Research Panel and CCUE Executive in the UK; the Steering Committee of the International Association of University Professors of English; and RCUK Global Challenges as well as other national and international professional bodies. In 2006, she was made  Honorary Centenary Fellow of the English Association,  in 2008 elected to the Royal Society of Arts, in 2011 elected to the International Association of University Professors of English, in 2012 received by the Queen at Buckingham Palace for heritage and scholarship in literature and theatre, and in 2014 elected to Academia Europaea. In 2012, she was the Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, in 2013 she gave the Ian Fletcher Lecture at Arizona State University at Tempe, and in 2014 Visiting Professor at the University of Delhi and Plenary Speaker at the English Language and Literature Association of Korea (Seoul).  In 2016-17 she co-hosted a conference at the India Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla,  and gave a keynote at the Asia Pacific Forum on Translation and World Literatures at UC Berkeley, among other Keynotes. She was President of the British Association for Victorian Studies 2009-12. She is currently Partner Investigator on a ARC grant and during 2022-23 will be Invited Visiting Fellow in Global Liberalisms at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University and Visiting Fellow at STIAS in South Africa. 

Gagnier is a native Californian who took her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English at the University of California at Berkeley.  She was tenured and made full professor at Stanford University, where she taught for fourteen years in English, Modern Thought and Literature, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Cultural Studies Group.  In 1996, she moved to the UK and the University of Exeter, where she is Professor of English and Senior Fellow of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/sociology/research/sts/egenis/. From 2008-2010 she was Director of Exeter's Interdisciplinary Institute (EII). 2009-2010 she was Chair of the Consortium of Institutes of Advanced Study UK and Ireland.

Research Specialisms:

• Victorian and modern Britain, esp. the fin de siecle
• the geopolitics of language and literature migration
• literary and social theory
• sex, gender, sexuality
• interdisciplinary studies, especially with the sciences and engineering
• digital humanities

 Major Publications

Single-authored Books

• Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, Stanford University Press (1986)

• Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920, Oxford University Press (1991)

• The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society, University of Chicago Press (2000)

• Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 Language, Discourse & Society series of Palgrave Macmillan, Eds. Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath, Denise Riley (2010)

Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century Palgrave Macmillan New Comparisons in World Literature series, Eds. Pablo Mukherjee and Neil Lazarus (2018)

Edited Collections

• Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde (editor and contributor), Macmillan/G.K. Hall, Critical Essays on British Literature (1992)

• Economics, Culture and Value, Guest Editor of and Contributor to Special Issue of New Literary History (May 2000)

• Victorian Boundaries, Guest Editor (with A. Richardson) of  and Contributor to Special Issue of Victorian Literature and Culture Vol. 32, No. 2 (2004): 392-628.

The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollop’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, Eds. Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Regenia Gagnier (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

Palgrave Sourcebook on Victorian Literature, Eds. John Plunkett, Ana Parejo Vadillo, Regenia Gagnier, Angelique Richardson,  Rick Rylance, Paul Young (2012)

• Editor in Chief, Scholarly Editing in the 21st Century Literature Compass 7:2 (Feb 2010): 144 pp. http://literature-compass. 

Eds. And Introduction,  Doyle, L. and Gagnier, R. (2012), The Global Circulation Project’s Forum on Global Modernisms. Literature Compass, 9: 589–592. doi: 10.1111/lic3.12008. Contributors: Supriya Chaudhuri, Elleke Boehmer, Wang Ning, Steven Yao, Paul Young, Katie Trumpener.

Guest Editor and Introduction, The State, or Statelessness, of  Victorian Studies, Special Issue Critical Quarterly, “Introduction: Victorian Studies, World Literatures, and Globalization.” 55:1 (April 2013) Contributors: Lyn Pykett, Mark Llewellyn, Ann Heilmann, Dino Felluga, Jay Clayton, Rae Greiner, David Kurnick

Research collaborations

See CV and Research Profile

Research supervision

Professor Gagnier's other professional passion is working with graduate students for academia's next generation. At Stanford and Exeter, she has supervised to completion 86  PhD students, who now teach in universities around the world. From 2001 through 2004, she was Dean of Exeter's Graduate School, overseeing 3500 MA and Ph.D. students across both HASS and STEMM subjects. She was the founding Convenor of the MA in Criticism and Theory, and taught the core course on Current Debates.  She was the founding Convenor of  the third-year option Advanced Critical Theory, whose students often go on to MAs and PhDs.  She alternates with English's twelve Victorianists in teaching on the MA in Victorian Studies.  She supervises PhD. students in  Victorian and Modern Literary Studies, global literary circulation and world literatures, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theoretical topics.

Research students

See Research Supervision

External impact and engagement

See CV

Contribution to discipline

See CV

Media

See CV

Modules taught

• EAS3131 - Advanced Critical Theory
• EASM106 - Criticism and Theory: Current Debates