Biography
Amy Murray Twyning earned her doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation, “Detective Narrative and the Problem of Origins in Nineteenth-Century England,” examines early examples of the detective genre in the context of social and legal change in the Victorian era. She is a scholar of Victorian literature and culture and lectures on the convergence of discourses of social class, evolution and natural science, and animal domestication where they define “the human” and “civilization.” Her secondary field of scholarship concerns contemporary speculative fiction, which she examines from the perspectives of Critical Race and Dis/Ability studies and Feminist and Posthumanist theory.
Amy is also interested in representations of children and childhood in the mid-Victorian period, in particular the relationship between the construction of childhood and the construction of modern subjectivity and individuality. She is especially interested in the novels of Charles Dickens and the children’s fantasy works of George MacDonald.
Amy serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Literature program and is its Undergraduate Research Coordinator. She also works with undergraduates to organize the annual Undergraduate Literature Conference.
Amy’s teaching was recognized with a Tina and David Bellet Award for Teaching Excellence in 2017. Some of the classes she has taught include Childhood’s Books, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, Humans, Animals, Machines in Victorian Literature, 19th-century British Literature, Austen and Brontë, Literary Field Studies, and Imagining Social Justice.