Devin M. Garofalo

Devin Garofalo is an Assistant Professor in UCSD's Literature Department and journal editor of Victorian Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her research and teaching move across the intersections of nineteenth-century literary studies, empire and race, the history of science and environmental humanities, gender and sexuality, and poetry and poetics. Three impulses motivate all her work: (1) understanding the entanglements of nineteenth-century poetry, colonial ecologies, and racialization; (2) tracing ways literary forms and figures have underwritten material processes of dehumanization from the eighteenth century into our own; and (3) exposing how certain reading methods shore up restrictive personhoods. Garofalo is the recipient of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies association's annual Richard Stein Essay Prize and the Vcologies Working Group's Early Career Prize. Her undergraduate teaching was also recognized by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the University of North Texas's Department of English, where she taught before joining UCSD.

Pronouns: she / her

Languages: English

Affiliated Faculty: Environmental Studies

Books

• Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human: Worlds Unmanned. Oxford UP (forthcoming).
• The Barbara Johnson Collective. Eds. Devin M. Garofalo and Nathan K. Hensley. Northwestern UP (forthcoming November 2026).

Articles & Book Chapters

• “The Material Conditions of Victorian Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 63.1 (2025 [2026]): 1-16 (forthcoming April 2026).
• "Barbara Johnson, Sylvia Wynter, and Anthropomorphosis." The Barbara Johnson Collective. Eds. Devin M. Garofalo and Nathan K. Hensley. Northwestern UP (forthcoming November 2026).
• “Barbara Johnson Still” (with Nathan K. Hensley). The Barbara Johnson Collective. Eds. Devin M. Garofalo and Nathan K. Hensley. Northwestern UP (forthcoming November 2026).
• "Romantic Manscapes." The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race. Ed. Manu Samriti Chander. Cambridge UP, 2025. 150-67.
• "Lyric Geology: Anthropomorphosis, White Supremacy, and Genres of the Human." Diacritics 50.1 (2022 [2023]): 32-61.
• “Worlds More or Less: Nineteenth-Century Ethno-Astronomy and Cosmologies of Reference.” European Romantic Review 32.5-6 (2021): 583-600.
• "Victorian Lyric in the Anthropocene." Victorian Literature and Culture 47.4 (2019): 753-83.
• “‘Drunk up by thirsty nothing’: The Fissured World of Prometheus Unbound.” Essays in Romanticism 22.1 (2015): 53-72.
• “Touching Worlds: Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Embodied Poetics.” Women’s Writing 22.2 (2015): 244-62.

Book Reviews

• Exhibition catalogs for Julian Charrière’s Towards No Earthly Pole (Dallas Museum of Art) and Kehinde Wiley’s The Prelude (National Gallery, London). Keats-Shelley Journal 72 (2023 [2025]): 166-70.
• Shawna Ross’s Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene (SUNY Press, 2020) and Seth T. Reno’s Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750-1884 (Palgrave, 2020). Victorian Studies 65.2 (2023): 357-60.
• Michael Tondre's The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (U Virginia Press, 2018). Studies in the Novel 51.4 (2019): 617-19.

Editorial Work

• Journal editor (2024 - present), Victorian Poetry (Johns Hopkins UP).
• Special issue editor. “The Material Conditions of Victorian Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 63.1 (Johns Hopkins UP, forthcoming April 2026).

Pedagogical Writing

• "Critical Theory: A Brief Guide." Featured as a pedagogical model in Columbia University Libraries' open-access project, Teaching Citational Practice (eds. Diana Newby and Cat Lambert).
• On Alexis Shotwell's Against Purity in "What to Read and Teach in the Environmental Humanities Now," Edge Effects (2021).
• “Everglades Romanticism: From Alligators to Nightingales.” European Romantic Review 31.3 (2020): 388-91.

• Ph.D. in English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2017
• Ph.D. Minor in History of Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2017
• M.A. in English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011
• B.A. in English, University of Nebraska-Omaha, 2010