Auerbach Dissertation Fellowship

The Auerbach Dissertation Fellowship in Victorian Studies, awarded annually, supports a final year of dissertation writing for a sixth-year Ph.D. student who works in Victorian or nineteenth-century British studies. The fellowship consists of a standard 10-month stipend at the university minimum, tuition, fees, and health insurance.

This endowed fellowship honors Nina Joan Auerbach (1943-2017), who was John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at Penn until her retirement in 2010. She published, lectured, and reviewed widely in the field of Victorian literature, theater, cultural history, and horror fiction and film.

Professor Auerbach earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970. She taught at Hunter college and California State University, Los Angeles before joining Penn in 1972. Her publications include Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), Our Vampires, Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Harvard University Press, 1990), Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (Columbia University Press, 1985), Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Harvard University Press, 1982), and Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1978). Before her death, she was working on a project tentatively titled Lost Lives, a study of ghosts and their purposes.

For more information on Nina Auerbach and her legacy, please see: https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/nina-auerbach

The Graduate Office will solicit applications to the Auerbach Dissertation Fellowship in the spring semester.