Andrea Kaston Tange

Andrea Kaston Tange has published widely on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, including articles in edited collections and in top-tier journals (including Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Victorian Poetry, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts). She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary work with a focus on material culture and daily lives. Her first book—Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes (University of Toronto Press, 2010)—was very well reviewed. She subsequently developed and co-edited a four-volume collection of primary documents on children and empire for Routledge press. Current projects include a monograph—Imagined Encounters: Public Impressions and Private Lives in the Age of Empire—under revision for a major university press, and a book-length work of narrative nonfiction focused on women's lives in the 1920s. Her most recent articles have centered on visual images and ephemera, and she has been branching out into public humanities writing, including a piece on Victorian Christmas cards in Slate.

She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Associated Departments of English (ADE), is past president of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, and has served terms as president of the Midwest Modern Language Association and chair of the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom Professional Rights and Responsibilities. In all of these capacities, she has been involved in national conversations about the state of humanities departments in higher education, in mentoring and program development work, and has also published on professional issues in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Profession. She spent the first fifteen years of her career on the faculty at Eastern Michigan University, and is in her eighth year on the faculty at Macalester College, where she has served as chair of the English department. Having worked in these two very different kinds of institutions gives her added insight into questions about the state of higher education within a national climate of hostility towards humanities disciplines and threats to academic freedom. She received her MA and PhD from the English department at the University of Wisconsin Madison.