Jillian Hess
(she/her/hers)
Professor of English at Bronx Community College
Hess’s work focuses on the history of note-taking practices. You can subscribe to her newsletter at https://jillianhess.substack.com/
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Academic Interests
Book History, Media Studies, Media Archeology, Romanticism, Victorianism, Structuralism, Digital Writing
Publications
How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection “Fly-Catchers”, while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a “Quarry,” and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his “Philosophical Miscellany.” Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship album. At the same time, the explosion of print allowed readers to cheaply cut-and-paste extractions rather than copying out quotations by hand. Built on the evidence of over 300 manuscripts, this volume unearths the composition practices of well-known writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and their less well-known contemporaries.
British Commonplace Readers, 1706-1879 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
“Dans l’album de Madame Constance Wilde”: Female Sociality and the Lady’s Album in Fin-de-Siècle England (Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 2019)
The Scholar’s Scrapbook: Reading Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (Book History, 2018)
Reframing Poetry: The Romantic Essay and the Prospects of Verse (European Romantic Review, 2013)Coleridge’s Fly-Catchers: Adapting Commonplace-Book Form
Education
I earned a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University in 2013 and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 2004. Before coming to BCC, I was a postdoctoral visiting scholar at the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA.
