Portrait of Virginia Zimmerman outside of a brick building.

Virginia Zimmerman

(2022-2025) Presidential Professor of English
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Virginia Zimmerman is Professor of English at Bucknell University. She specializes in Victorian literature and culture and in children's and YA literature from the 19th century to the present.

Professor Zimmerman's scholarly works address the intersection of material culture and time, whether in poems about archaeology or in children's books. Dr. Zimmerman's essays have appeared in Victorian Studies, Children's Literature, Configurations, the Journal of Literature & Science, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorians Institute Journal, Pedagogy, and The Lion and the Unicorn, as well as recent collections published by MLA, Cambridge, Palgrave, Routledge, and Manchester UP. Her book Excavating Victorians was published by SUNY press in 2008.

Professor Zimmerman also writes children's fiction: La Finestra del Temps (Cruïlla 2012), The Rosemary Spell (HMH/Clarion Books 2015) and PINK! A Women’s March Story (Running Press 2022).
 

Education

  • Ph.D., Virginia

Teaching Interests

  • Victorian literature and culture
  • Young adult fiction and children's literature
  • The nineteenth-century novel
  • Nineteenth-century women's literature
  • Children and immigration

Scholarly Interests

  • Victorian literature
  • Children's literature
  • Science and literature
  • Serial publication

Recent and Representative Publications

“Collaborative Childhoods: Children’s Homemade Magazines of the Pre-Raphaelite and Bloomsbury Circles.” Victorian Literature and Culture. Forthcoming: 2025.

“If You Had Not Been Put in Vinegar: Children’s Commentary on Time in Homemade Magazines, 1850-1925.” Children’s Literature 53 (2024).

“Texts in Time: Periodical and Serial Publishing for Children.” The Cambridge History of Children's Literature in English, Volume 2: 1830-1914. (ed. by Eugene Giddens and Zoe Jaques) Cambridge UP: forthcoming.

“Time In-Between: Intra-temporality and Coming of Age in Dickens and Nesbit.” Victorian Studies 65.3 (Spring 2023) 478-87.

Awards and Honors

  • Presidential Professorship 2022–25
  • Bucknellian Faculty of the Year 2021
  • NEH Chair in the Humanities 2013–16
  • Scadden Fellowship 2010
  • Presidential Award for Teaching Excellence 2009

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