Department of English
University of Delaware
Newark, Delaware  19716
TEL: (302) 831-8059
FAX: (302) 831-1586
Electronic Address: bgates@udel.edu

Educational Information

B.A.  Northwestern University - 1958.  Departmental majors: English and history.
M.A.  University of Delaware - 1961.
Ph.D. Bryn Mawr College - 1971.  Danforth Fellow.  Fields of concentration: Romantic poetry, Victorian poetry, Victorian novel.  Dissertation topic: "Wordsworth and Clio."

Academic honors and awards

Honors in English, Northwestern University, 1958.
Danforth Fellow, Bryn Mawr College, 1967-71.
Danforth Associate, 1973-.
Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1974.
Consultant in Excellence in Teaching and Distinguished Academic Service, Department of Education, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study, University of Delaware, 1990-1.
Recipient of E. Arthur Trabant Award for Promoting Equity at the University  of Delaware, 1992.
Alumni Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies, 1994-.
CASE Professor of the Year, 1995 (Carnegie Foundation honoree).
Year 2000 Founders Distinguished Senior Scholar, American Association of University Women

Research grants

Dissertation-year Fellowship, Danforth Foundation - 1970-71.
University of Delaware, Summer Research Grants - 1972, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1989, 1996.
American Philosophical Society Grant - 1976.
DIMER Research Grant (Social and Cultural Aspects of Science) - 1977.
ACLS Grant - 1979.
NEH Summer Grants - 1981, 1989.
NEH Travel Grant - 1984.
Residency, Blue Mountain  Center - summers of 1986, 1987, 1991.
Delaware Humanities Forum Grant, 1987-88. 
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study, University of Delaware - 1990-91.

Professional experience

1965-67 Lecturer in English, Widener College, Chester, PA.
1971-76 Assistant Professor of English, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware; Member of Graduate      Faculty, 1975-present.
1976-88 Associate Professor of English, University of  Delaware. 
1983  Exchange Professor, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
1986  Visiting Professor, University of California-Davis.

1988-94 Professor of English, University of Delaware.
1988  Director, London Program, University of Delaware.
1990  Exchange Professor, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
1992  Director of Women's Studies, University of Delaware.
1994-     Alumni Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies.

Professional societies

MLA, NEMLA, AAUP, Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, Dickens Society, Brontë Society, Society for Values in Higher Education, Northeast Victorian Studies Association, Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Nineteenth-Century Studies  Association, History of Science Society, Society for Literature and Science
 Offices held
 Director, and member of the Executive Council, Northeast Modern Language Association, 1976-1979.

Professional listings

Directory of American Scholars, MLA Directory of Women Scholars, Dictionary of International Biography, Who's Who of American Women, World Who's Who of Women, Who's Who in America,  Who's Who in the East, International Who's Who of Intellectuals.

Readerships

PMLA, Victorian Studies, Dickens Studies Annual, MOSAIC,Nineteenth Century Prose, ISLE, Papers in Language and Literature,  Isis, Journal of Victorian Culture, Signs, Nineteenth-Century Studies, National Endowment for the Humanities Grants, also for numerous university presses and tenure files.
 

Editorial/Advisory Boards (current only)
Nineteenth-Century Studies, Australasian Victorian Studies Annual.
 

Selected Papers and Public Lectures

"Wordsworth's Symbolic White Doe: 'The Power of History in the Mind'" - Seminar on Literature and History, MLA, December, 1972.

"Landscape and Literature: An Excursion with the Wordsworths" - National Council of Teachers of English,  November, 1973.

"Wordsworth and the Course of History" - General Topics 2, MLA, December, 1975.

"The Prelude, Cambridge, and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination" - Prelude Seminar, MLA, December, 1975.

"Cultural Attitudes toward Suicide" - Delaware Humanities Forum, October, 1976.

"Providential History and The Excursion"- Excursion Seminar, MLA, December, 1976.

"Suicide and the Victorian Physicians" - Northeast Victorian Studies Association, April, 1979.

"The Brontës: New Directions in Research and Criticism"-Chair, Brontë Seminar, MLA, December, 1979.

"Jane Eyre and Poverty" - Australasian Victorian Studies Association, January, 1980, and Nineteenth-century                      Women  Writers Conference, Hofstra University, November, 1980.

"Death and the Victorians" - in conjunction with the exhibition "A Time to Mourn," Brandywine River Museum, May, 1981; Melbourne Dickens Society, March, 1983.

"The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" - Mental Health and Modern Literature Symposium, sponsored by                   Delaware Mental Health Association, October, 1981.

"The Dead End of Finance" - Northeast Victorian Studies annual meeting, April 2-4, 1982; Philadelphia Literary Fellowship, October, 1984.

"The Fantastic and Bizarre in Victorian Literature" - Delaware Art Museum Lecture Series, March 30, 1982.

"Framing Sonnets: Whistler's Quip and Rossetti's Artistry" - Pre-Raphaelite Symposium, Delaware Art Museum,                  October, 1984.

"'How Does Cato Die?'"  Ancient Suicides and Victorian Dilemmas"- Victorians Institute Conference, Georgetown University, October, 1985.

"Blue Devils and Green Tea:  Sheridan Le Fanu's Haunted Suicides" - Northeast Victorian Studies Association, April, 1985; Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Christchurch, New Zealand, January, 1987.

"Environmental Literature from a Cross-cultural Perspective"-The Cross-Cultural Study of Literature, Taiwan, March, 1990.

"Retelling the Story of Science: Women Popularizers in Nineteenth-century Britain" - Conference on Narrative                   Theory, Nice, France, June, 1991; and Science and Literature Society, Montreal, Canada, October,                          1991.

"Writing for the Birds: the Women of the Society for the Protection of Birds"- MLA annual meeting, San Francisco, December, 1991; Conference of Irish Historians, Belfast, May, 1993.

"Revisioning Darwin, with Sympathy" - International Society for the Study of European Ideas, Aalborg, Denmark,                  August, 1992  and Society for Literature and Science, Atlanta, October, 1992.

"Gendered Angling, Angling Women" - Northeast Victorian Studies Association, Providence, RI, May, 1993.

"Wizards and Fairies in Scienceland" -  MLA annual meeting, Toronto, December, 1994; Revised for Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Adelaide, February, 1996.

"Whatever Happened to ecofeminisme? Ecofeminism" - International Society for  the Study of European      Ideas, Graz, Austria, August, 1994.

"The Nature of Natural History" - History of Science Meeting, New Orleans, October, 1994.

"An Ecology of Ecofeminism" -  MLA annual meeting, San Diego, December, 1994.

"Reordering Nature: Re-visioning Victorian Science Culture"- Contexts of Victorian Science, Toronto, May, 1995.

"Site and Sight in Gertrude Jekyll's Garden Writing" - British Comparative Literature Association, Edinburgh,  Scotland, July, 1995.

"Poetry, Prose, and the Pre-Raphaelites" - Delaware Art Museum, August, 1995.

"Packaging Self with Science" - SLS, Pittsburgh, October, 1997.

"Self-writing as Legacy; or the Perils of Dying" - MLA, Toronto, December, 1997.

"Covert Confederates: Women on the Edge of Science" - CUNY Graduate Conference, May, 1998.

"Shifting Continents, Shifting Species: Louisa Anne Meredith at 'Home' in Tasmania" - Science and Literature    Society, Gainesville, FL, November, 1998.

"Of Fungi and Fables: Beatrix Potter's Science and Storytelling" -Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Sydney, Australia, February, 1999; Science and Literature Society, Pittsburgh, November, 1999.

"Re-conceptualizing Women as Nature Writers" - Women and Gender in Science, Medicine and Technology" -  St. Louis, October, 2000.

"Exhibiting Victorian Women" - Victorian Section Session, MLA, Washington, DC, December, 2000.

"Women Who Popularized Natural History" - Framing the Victorians, London, July 2001.

"Whose Book? Whose Illustrations? Victorian Women and Science Illustration," Conference on Figurative Language in 19th- Century Science, York University, Canada, May 2002. 

Keynote speaker: "Keeping One's Promise: WOmen Who Did," Women of Promise Banquet, University of Delaware, November 2002.

Panel moderator: "Nature in Modernism," Modernist Studies Association, Madison, November 2002.

"Women and Natural History," Harrisburg Academy, launch for Women's History Month, March 2003.

"Women Illustrating Victorian Natural History," Illuminating Nature: Spotlights on Natural History Illustration, Society for the History of Natural History, Florence, Italy, May 2003. 

Publications

Books:

Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 
Trans. Japanese and published by Eihosha Ltd., 1999. 
Electronically reproduced by the Victorian Web, 2001, at                  (http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/books/suicide/contents.html)
 rev. London Review of Books (31 August 1989):11-12.
 rev. History: Review of New Books (Summer 1989). 
 rev. Victorian Poetry (Summer 1989).
 rev. Nineteenth-Century Literature (December 1989): 396-99.
 rev. Psychological Medicine 19 (1989): 801.
 rev. Nineteenth-Century Prose (Winter 1989-90):72-74.
 rev. Journal of Social History 24 (Winter 1990): 439-41.
 rev. Victorian Studies (Spring 1990): 520-21.
 rev. Dickens Quarterly (December 1989): 171-74.
 rev. Year's Work in English Studies 70.

Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë. (Ed.) Boston: G. K. Hall,  1989.

Journal of Emily Shore. (Ed.) Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991.

Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science. (Ed. with Ann B. Shteir) Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997 (Science and Literature Series).
 rev. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 28 (1998).
 rev. Biography 21 (Summer 1998): 368-72.
 rev. Counterpoise (January 1998).
 rev. College English 60 (April 1998): 445-50.
 rev. Technical Communication Quarterly (Spring 1999): 203-07.
 rev. Journal of the History of Biology 32 (1999).
 rev. Journal of Women's History (Autumn 1999): 220.
 rev. Modern Philology 97 (May 2000).

Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Embrace the Living World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,                     1998. 
 rev. BBC Wildlife  ((October 1999).
 rev. Library Journal (January 1999).
 rev. Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 5 (1999): 182-84).
 rev. Amicus Journal (Winter 2000).
 rev. Environmental History 5.2 (April 2000): 257-58.
 rev. Isis 91 (September 2000)
 rev. Journal of the History of Biology 33 (2000).
 rev. Victorians Institute Journal 28 (2000): 178-80.
 rev. Victorian Studies 43.2 (Winter 2001): 326-28.

In Nature's Name: An Anthology of Women's Writing and Illustration, 1780-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
rev. The Guardian (June 2002).
rev. H-Net Book Review (June 2002).
rev. TLS (August 2002): 8.
rev. Onearth (Summer 2002): 39-40.
rev. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 32.2 (2002) 412.
rev. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 45.3 (2002) 373.
rev. Audobon Naturalist News (July/August 2002) 72.
rev. Choice 40.2 (October 2002) 278-79.
rev. Women's Review of Books 19 (July 2002) 10-1.
rev. Journal of the History of Biology 35 (2002).
rev. Environmental History 8.1 (January 2003) 157-59.
rev. Endeavour 26.3 (2002).

Arabella Buckley, The Fairy-land of Science (Intro. by Barbara T. Gates) Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003.

Eliza Brightwen, Wild Nature Won By Kindness and More About Wild Nature (Intro. by Barbara T. Gates) Bristol: Thoemmes Oress, forethcoming. 

Articles, Essays, Sections of Books:

"Dylan Thomas' 'In My Craft or Sullen Art'." The Explicator 32.9 (May 1974): Item 68.

"Wordsworth and Oral History." Folklore 85 (Winter 1974): 254-67.

"Wordsworth's Symbolic White Doe." Criticism 17 (Summer 1975): 234-45.

The Quest for Aesthetic Truth: Croce and Coleridge," with G.N.G. Orsini. Thought, Action and Intuition: A Symposium on  the Philosophy of Benedetto Croce. Ed. H.M. Palmer and
 H.S. Harris.  Hildesheim, Ger.: Verlag Georg Olms, 1975. 266-279.

"Wordsworth's Lessons from the Past." The Wordsworth Circle 7.2 (Spring 1976): 133-42.

"'A Temple of false goddis': Cupidity and Mercantile Values in Chaucer's Fruit-tree Episode."                         Neuphilologische  Mitteilungen 77.3 (1976): 369-75.

"Arnold's Empedocles and the Book of Common Prayer." Renascence 27.4 (Summer 1976): 215-22.

"'Visionary Woe' and Its Revision: Another Look at Jane Eyre's Pictures." ARIEL 7 (October 1976): 36-49.

"Suicide and Wuthering Heights." Victorian Newsletter 50 (Fall 1976): 15-19.  Reprinted in Readings on          "Wuthering  Heights", ed.Hayley Mitchell.  San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998.

"Wordsworth and the Course of History." Research Studies 44 (December 1976): 199-207.

"The Prelude and the Development of Wordsworth's Historical Imagination." Etudes Anglaises 30.2 (1977): 169-78.

"Suicide, Bentley's Miscellany, and Dickens's Chimes." Dickens Studies Newsletter 8.4 (December 1977): 98-100.

"Providential History and The Excursion." The Wordsworth Circle 9 (Spring 1978): 178-81.

"Victorian Attitudes toward Suicide and 'Mr. Tennyson's Despair'." Tennyson Research Bulletin 3.3 (November 1979): 101-10.

"Suicide and the Victorian Physicians." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (April 1980): 164-74.

"Wordsworth's Mirror of Morality: Distortions of Church History." The Wordsworth Circle 12.2 (Spring 1981):   129-32.

Catalogue: Ut Pictura Poesis: Victorian Art and Literature. Exhibition at the University of Delaware, March-April, 1981.

"Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf's Suicide." Virginia Woolf Miscellany 18 (Spring 1982): 5.

"Kurtz's Moral Insanity." Victorians Institute Journal 11 (1982-83): 52-59.

"Revising The House of Life: A Look at Seven Unpublished Sonnets." Victorian Poetry 21 (Spring 1983): 65-78.

"Wilkie Collins's Suicides: 'Truth as it is in Nature'." Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 12:303-18. Reprinted in Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments. New York: AMS Press, 1996. 

"Framing Sonnets: Whistler's Quip and Rossetti's Artistry." Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 5 (May 1985): 27- 30.

"Jane Eyre and Poverty." Nineteenth-Century Writers of the English-Speaking World. Ed. Rhoda B. Nathan.    Contributions in Women's Studies 69.  New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1986. 79-89.

"Blue Devils and Green Tea:  Sheridan Le Fanu's Haunted Suicides." Studies in Short Fiction 24 (Winter 1987): 15-23.

"Not Choosing Not to Be." Literature and Medicine 6 (1987): 77-91.

"Suicide (1823-1900)." Victorian Britain:  An Encyclopedia. Ed. Sally  Mitchell. New York and London: Garland, 1988.

"Reader's Response." Victorian Poetry 30.1 (Spring 1992): 18.

"Retelling the Story of Science: Women Popularizers of the Nineteenth Century." Victorian Literature and Culture 21 (1993): 289-306.

"Down Garden Paths: Charlotte Brontë's Haunts of Self and Other." Victorian Newsletter  83 (Spring 1993): 35-43.

"Suicide." The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art and Culture. Ed. G. A. Cevasco. New York and London: Garland Publishing Company, 1993. 598-99.

"Revisioning Darwin with Sympathy." History of European Ideas, 19.4 (1994): 761-8.

"Writing for the Birds." Chattel, Servant or Citizen. Women's Status in Church, State, and Society, Ed. Mary     O'Dowd and Sabine Weichert. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1995. 149-55.

"A Root of Ecofeminism: ecofeminisme," ISLE 3.1 (Summer 1996): 7- 16. Reprinted in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, Ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy.  Urbana-Champaign: U of Illinois Press, 1998. 15-22.

"Revisioning Darwin with Arabella Buckley."  Natural Eloquence. Ed. Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 164-76.

"Ordering Nature: Re-visioning Victorian Science Culture."  Contexts in Victorian Science.  Ed. Bernard        Lightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.  177-86.

"The Aesthetic in the Natural: Gertrude Jekyll's Garden Writing." New Readings of British Aestheticism. Ed. Kathy Psomiades and Talia Schaffer.  Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia Press, 1999. 161-72.

New DNB essays on Arabella Buckley, Emily Shore, and Eliza Brightwen. Forthcoming.
 

Selected Reviews:

Giambattista Vico's New Science of Humanity. CLIO (Spring 1977): 351-4.

The Sense of an Audience: Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot at Mid-Century.  The Arnoldian 10 (Spring  1983): 50-1.

Gardens and Grim Ravines: The Language of Landscape in Victorian Poetry.  The Arnoldian 11 (Winter 1984): 34-5.

Review essay on recent criticism of the Brontës for Victorian Studies 28 (Autumn 1984): 194-6.

Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England. Victorian Studies 32 (Autumn 1988): 117-19.

Private Theatricals.  Nineteenth Century Prose 18 (Winter 1990-1991): 54-6.

Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Dickens Quarterly 11. 1 (March 1992): 34-6.

The Adytum of the Heart: The Literary Criticism of Charlotte Brontë. Victorian Studies 38 (Winter 1995): 278-9.

The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. Journal of the History of Human    Sexuality 6 (January 1996): 468-70.

Open Fields: Science and Cultural Encounter. Isis 88.3 (September 1997): 518-9.

The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Victorian Studies. 41.4 (Summer 1998): 672-74.

Essay review on three new ecofeminist books. Signs. 25.2 (Winter 2000): 602-06.

Farther Afield: In the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Isis 92.1 (March, 2001): 142-3.

Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women's Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation. Victorian Studies. (Summer 2002): 716-17.
 
 

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