Eddy Kent, BSc, MA, PhD

Contact

Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts - English & Film Studies Dept

Email: ejkent@ualberta.ca
Address: 4-83 Humanities Centre
11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW

Edmonton AB

T6G 2H5

Overview

About

Eddy Kent joined the Department in July 2009 as an Assistant Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture and was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2015. Before that, he was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow for one year in the Department of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and a sessional instructor at the University of British Columbia while writing his doctoral thesis. He studied for his undergraduate degree in Mathematics at Western University and completed his graduate studies in English at the University of Waikato (MA) and the University of British Columbia (PhD).

Eddy is the author of Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786-1901 (2014) and is the editor (with Terri Tomsky) of Negative Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking World Citizenship After Globalization (2017). He is known for his writing on literary representations of Victorian imperialism, and also for his work on cosmopolitanism and neoVictorian fiction. He is a founding editor of and contributor to The Floating Academy: A Victorian Studies Blog. His research has been supported by grants from SSHRC and the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies.

His interest in how corporations develop cultures that shape the way individuals think and feel about the state was sparked by the time he spent between his undergraduate and graduate studies selling advertising in London.

Research

Eddy is an expert in Victorian literature, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism. His recent monograph, Corporate Culture: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786-1901 (2014) studies how explicitly corporate ways of thinking and feeling influenced imperial lives in the Victorian period. His interest in cosmopolitanism manifests in essays on "William Morris's Green Cosmopolitanism" (2011) and "Ship-siblings: Globalisation, Neoliberal Aesthetics, and Neo-Victorian Form in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies" (2015), as well as the essay collection co-edited with Terri Tomsky, Negative Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking World Citizenship After Globalization (2017).

He is currently working on a project describing the cultures of nineteenth-century extraction, exploring how a range of Victorian artists, scientists, and policymakers responded to the social, political, and environmental implications of Britain's increasing reliance on minerals, metals, and fossil energy.

Teaching

Eddy has supervised graduate projects on a variety of topics related to Victorian literature, including late-Victorian biopolitics; the function of dress in Victorian sensation fiction; the child imperialist in nineteenth-century travel fiction; imperialism in Tennyson's Idylls of the King; the Kelmscott Press edition of William Morris's News from Nowhere; evangelical social reform novels; shame in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone; and female moral influence in Charles Dickens's novels.

In 2015, he received a Faculty of Arts Teaching Award (Early Achievement).

He welcomes proposals from graduate and undergraduate students interested in working on areas related to Victorian studies, neo-Victorian studies, extraction economies, nineteenth-century social movements, globalization, (neo)liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and theories of the novel.

Courses

ENGL 673 - Victorian Texts

Winter Term 2025

Browse more courses taught by Eddy Kent

Scholarly Activities

Research - English Studies in Canada

ESC is an academic journal based at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and is the official journal of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. As the nation's leading generalist journal in the discipline of English Studies, we publish quarterly in print and digital formats to a global audience.

ESC: English Studies in Canada

Research - NAVSA 2017

The 2017 annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association is being organized by the University of Alberta.

NAVSA webpage

Research - The Floating Academy

"The Floating Academy” was nineteenth-century criminal slang for the notorious Hulks – merchant and naval ships that the British converted into prisons to ease overcrowded gaols in the late eighteenth century. The solution was supposed to be temporary, but lasted over a hundred years. Many convicts awaited transportation to Australia and New Zealand on the Hulks; others never left the Thames.

Like Pip, we begin our adventures by asking questions, hoping to navigate our way through the waters of nineteenth-century studies. We are a kind of floating collective of nine scholars of Victorian literature and culture at early stages in our careers. While our current research projects are diverse, we share a common interest in the affinities between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century culture, technology, and aesthetics. We are interested in Victorian books (the things themselves), novels and poetry, printed materials such as newspapers, periodicals, and visual images, representations of masculinity and femininity (whether fixed or floating), constructions of disability, the culture of Empire and its management, and technologies of mobility and communication and their transformations or continuations in our own age of digitization and globalization. Fundamentally, we hope to provide an interactive forum for discussions of current research in Victorian literature and culture, and we hope you enjoy drifting with us.

The Floating Academy