Dan Abitz, PhD

Pedagogical Interests

Community-Based Pedagogy; Attention Studies; First-Year Composition; Multimodality; Writing in the Disciplines; Service-Learning; Public and Professional Writing; Utopian Pedagogy

Research Interests

Utopian Literature; Victorian Literature, Nineteenth-Century US Literature; Women’s Writing; Gender & Sexuality Studies; George Eliot; Henry James; Vegan Studies; Animal Studies; Psychoanalysis

Personal Interests

Reading; first editions of books; writing about music; cooking meals at home; loose-leaf tea; Scrabble; cassette tapes; high-end candles; bowling; walking; yoga; birds; animal welfare; beagles; talking to and texting with friends all day long

Best Writing Advice

Read! Read the genres in which you want to write. Find authors you love. Take note of their style. Be influenced. Commit to messy drafts, multiple stages of editing, and deleting your favourite passages if and when necessary.

Think of your writing as “a probably flawed contribution to a perpetually interesting conversation.”

Publications

“Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora and the Vegan Politics of the Future.” Vegan Intersections: History, Literature, Theory. Ed. Deborah Madsen & Ridvan Askin. Forthcoming in November 2026.

“Androgynous Possibilities in Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 19.2 (2023), n.p.

“’This is me now!’: Gene’s Gender Play in Bob’s Burgers.” Animated Mischief: Thirty Years of

Cartoon Subversiveness 1988-1918. Eds. Brian Duchaney and David Silverman.

McFarland, 147-166. 2023.

“Sinthomosexuality and the Fantasy of Travel in The Time Machine.” The Comparatist 45 (2021), 135-157.

“Animal Welfare.” Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Eds. Lesa Scholl and Emily

Morris. Palgrave Macmillan. December 2020 (online). Print edition released in 2022.

“Getting Off: Henry James and Writing Utopia.” Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump:

Images from Literature and Visual Arts. Eds. Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan.

Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 7-22. 2019. Paperback edition released in April 2021.

“Eliot & Hobbes: Finding Leviathan in ‘Hints on Snubbing’ and ‘Janet’s Repentance.’”

Victorians: A Journal of Literature and Culture 131 (2017), 13-25.

“Beauty and Blindness: Navigating the Techno-Body in Henry James’s ‘Glasses.’” Henry James
Review 31.3 (2016), 284-291.

“Female on Female Violence: A Look into The Mixquiahuala Letters.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Review 44.1 (2015), 84-98.