Magdalena Nerio, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Instruction, English

Magdalena Nerio

Bio

Maggie Nerio teaches and writes about Anglo-American literature and culture, c. 1660-1870. She teaches a variety of courses for undergraduate majors at UTSA, including courses on the novel, literary criticism and analysis, metafiction, women’s writing, the New England Transcendentalists, Gilded Age literature, and nineteenth century social reform movements. Currently, she is writing about Elizabeth Gaskell’s representation of a fictional community of English dissenters in the mid-century social problem novel. In addition, she has published articles on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, and the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Broadly, her research explores epistolary form, the rhetoric of nineteenth-century social reform movements, and political engagement in women’s writing of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries.

Teaching

  • ENG 3133: WOMEN AND LITERATURE: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, ELIZABETH INCHBALD, JANE AUSTEN 
  • ENG 4973: SENIOR SEMINAR: ROMANTIC EXCESS: FORMS OF EXCESS IN BRITISH ROMANTICISM, 1790-1830 
  • ENG 4973: SENIOR SEMINAR: RIVALS AND FRIENDS: HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON 

Research Interests

  • 18th and 19th century Anglo-American literature and culture, c. 1660-1865
  • Women’s writing with a focus on epistolary form of the long 18th century
  • Romanticism, c. 1790-1835
  • Victorian literature and culture, c. 1837-1870
  • Feminist literary history
  • Shakespeare with an emphasis on 19th century criticism of Shakespeare
  • The New England Transcendentalists with a focus on Margaret Fuller

Degrees

  • Ph.D. in English, University of Notre Dame (2013)
  • M.A. in English, University of Notre Dame (2009)
  • B.A. in English, Brown University (2004)

Honors and Awards

Minnie Helen Hicks Prize, Brown University, 2004

Presentations

“Everyday Habits: The Representation of Dissent in Gaskell’s Ruth,” for The Elizabeth Gaskell Conference, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, June 2023.

“Everyday Tactics: Dissent in Gaskell’s Ruth (1853),” for a special panel on C. 19 realism titled “The Everyday Beyond Description,” for the annual meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), Niagara Falls, NY, March 2023.

“‘My heart cries out against God’s will’: Gender and the Devotional Impulse in Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography (1899) and the Seventeenth-Century Diary of Anne Clifford (1603- 1619),” essay prepared for the “Margaret Oliphant in Context” conference, hosted by the University of Leicester, England, UK, July 2015.

“Private Sentiment, Political Emotion: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Love Letters,” essay prepared for the BWWC (British Women Writers Conference), hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, New York, New York, June, 2015.

Publications

Selected Publications:

“Everyday Habits: The Representation of Dissent in Gaskell’s Ruth.” The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited by Elizabeth Ludlow and Rebecca Styler. Forthcoming, 2024.


“Activist Discourse and the Origins of Feminist Shakespeare Studies.” Multicultural Shakespeare. Forthcoming, 2023.

“Mrs. A. Kendall, Derwent Priory (1798).” The Cambridge Guide to the to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820. Ed. April London. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

“Olivia Wilmot Serres, St. Julian: In A Series of Letters (1805).” The Cambridge Guide to the to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820. Ed. April London. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

“The ‘Unfeudal Tone’ in Context: Teaching Persuasion through Mary Wollstonecraft.” Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Persuasion. Ed. Marcia Folsom and John Wiltshire. Modern Language Association, 2020.

“Genteel Appropriations of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762): Lady Louisa Stuart, William Moy Thomas, and the Rigors of Victorian Memoir.” Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Brenda Ayres. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.