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Hannah Markley

Assistant Professor of English

Markley's areas of interest include literature of the long nineteenth century and its intersections with literary and medical culture. Specifically, while the study of nineteenth-century literature since Raymond Williams has entailed a consideration of the relationships among literary and consumer cultures, Markley's interest lies in the ways literary representations of the body’s physiological functions encode economic, political, and environmental impacts. Markley's scholarship and teaching examine consumption as a figure that traverses multiple scales to organize socio-political meanings, from the orientalist landscapes of Thomas De Quincey’s opium fantasies or Karl Marx’s equation of capitalism to vampirism to depictions of microscopic consumption in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Their first book, Morbid Cravings, has been called "insightful and searing" and "a complex, masterful contribution" to the study of British colonialism in the nineteenth century.

  • PhD, English Literature, Emory University
  • MA, Critical Theory, University of Sussex
  • BA, English Literature, Kenyon College

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Biography

Hannah Markley's teaching and research works at the intersections of nineteenth-century literature, gender and sexuality studies, and the medical humanities, exploring topics from the medical concept of addiction to the biopolitics of breathing. In addition to focusing on the interdisciplinary overlap of literature and medicine, their teaching and mentorship aims to support students as they develop critical habits of mind and interpretive skills that prepare them for engaged, intellectual work in college and beyond. In addition to teaching and mentorship, Markley has published a monograph, Morbid Cravings, and several scholarly articles that focus on the intersections of literature and medicine, gender, and the politics of disease.

More About Hannah Markley

Areas of Expertise

  • Nineteenth-Century literature
  • Gender and Sexuality studies
  • Medical and Health Humanities
  • Queer and Feminist theory

Course Sampling

  • Drugs and Monsters: Difference and Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Literature
  • Love and Loss at the End of the World
  • Women and Madness in the Nineteenth Century
  • Queer Theory

  • Nineteenth-century literature
  • Romanticism
  • Victorian Studies
  • Medical Humanities
  • Critical Theory
  • Queer Theory

Monographs

  • Morbid Cravings: Appetite and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Ohio State University Press, 2027.

Peer-Reviewed

  • “Monstrous Disorders: The Dysmorphic Gothic in Frankenstein and The Substance.” FRAME: Journal for Literary Studies. 38.2. 2025. 
  • “Plague and the Politics of Sisterhood: Traces of Antigone in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. 59.1 (2026). Forthcoming.
  • “Disabling Appetites: Hunger and Debility in Wuthering Heights.” Studies in the Novel. 58.2 (2026). Forthcoming.
  • “An Appetite for Injection: Addiction, Gender, and Race in The Sign of Four (1890).” Literature and Medicine. 42.4 (2024): 413-437. 
  • “Gut Sympathy: Anthropomorphism and Disgust in Sidney Whiting’s Memoirs of a Stomach (1853). Configurations. 29.2 (2021).
  • “Mother Palimpsest: Reproduction in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis.” Essays in Romanticism. 24.1 (2017), 69-82.
  • “‘In and among us’: Specters of Friendship in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.” European Romantic Review. 27:5 (2016), 623-637.