Albert Pionke joined the faculty in 2005 as an assistant professor. He was awarded tenure and the rank of associate professor in 2009, and was promoted to professor in 2014. Between fall 2016 and spring 2019, he served a three-year appointment as a College of Arts and Sciences Leadership Board Faculty Fellow.  In February 2019, he was named the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor of English, and in March 2023, he was appointed Assistant Dean for General Education.  Pionke is sole editor of the Victorians Institute Journal, which invites submissions from both established and emerging scholars of Victorian and Edwardian literature and culture, and co-editor of Digital Studies in Language and Literature, an open-access peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary publication dedicated to advancing research on the intersection of digital technology, language, and literature.

A Victorian specialist with interests in cultural, imperial, intellectual, literary, and social history, as well as bibliography, pedagogy, and the Digital Humanities, Pionke is the author of Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (2004), The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals: Competing for Ceremonial Status, 1838-1877 (2013), Teaching Later British Literature: A Thematic Approach (2019), and Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform (2023); the co-editor of Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment (2010), Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence (2018), and The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19^th and 20^th Century Britain: Victorian and Edwardian Inflections (2020); and the general editor of the COVE Edition (2021) of William North’s The City of the Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls: A Romance of the “Golden” Age (1850).  He has also published articles on Victorian fiction, nonfiction prose, and poetry in many of the field’s leading journals, including Dickens Studies Annual, ELH, Philosophy and Literature, Studies in the Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Poetry, and Victorian Studies.  Pionke has secured external grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the NEH.

Working collaboratively with the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, Pionke is also currently engaged in a project to digitize and make fully searchable all marginalia in Somerville College’s John Stuart Mill Library. Visit the home page of Mill Marginalia Online, and begin your own search through the marks and annotations with which James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and others recorded their own experiences as readers.

Books Authored

• Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
• Teaching Later British Literature: A Thematic Approach.  London: Anthem Press, 2019.
• The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals: Competing for Ceremonial Status, 1838-1877.  Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. [paperback London: Routledge, 2016].
• Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004.

Books Edited

• The City of the Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls: A Romance of the “Golden” Age, by William North.  COVE Editions.  COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education).  Gen. ed. Dino Franco Felluga.
• The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19^th and 20^th Century Britain: Victorian and Edwardian Inflections.  London: Routledge, 2020.  Co-edited with Maria K. Bachman.
• Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence.  Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018. Co-edited with Megan Dent and Paul Kerry.
• Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment.  Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. [paperback London: Routledge, 2016]. Co-edited with Denise Millstein.

Select Articles and Essays

• “The Post-Sensational Seventies,” Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s, Ed. Alison Chapman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
• “Poetry and Sociology in Harriet Martineau’s Miscellanies (1836),” The Palgrave Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science, Ed. Pamela Gilbert, Cham: Palgrave, forthcoming.
• “Reconstructing an Ancient Monument to Mid-Victorian Liberalism, One Annotation at a Time: John Stuart Mill’s Marginalia in George Grote’s History of Greece,” VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal 48 (2021): 130-160.
  
• “John Stuart Mill in the Context of his own Marginalia,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 47.1 (Spring 2020): 91-120. Co-authored with Emma Annette Wilson.
• “Handwritten Marginalia and Digital Search: The Development and Early Research Results of Mill Marginalia Online.” ILCEA4 39 (2020). https://journals.openedition.org/ilcea/8568
• “Introduction, The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain: Victorian and Edwardian Inflections, Eds. Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke, London: Routledge, 2020, pp. 1-24.
• “Mill, Comte, and the Literature of Sociological Critique, The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain: Victorian and Edwardian Inflections, Eds. Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke, London: Routledge, 2020, pp. 25-41.
• “‘Master Jonathan’ in Cuba: A Case Study in Colonial Bildungskarikatur,”  Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature and Satirical Art, Eds. Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 25-41. Co-authored with Frederick Whiting.
• “Cardinal Manning and the Redisciplining of Biography,” Victorian Studies 61.1 (Autumn 2018): 86-92.
• “Introduction: Carlyle’s Networks of Influence,” Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence, Eds. Kerry, Pionke, and Dent, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018, pp. 1-24.
• “Influence as Palimpsest: Carlyle, Mill, Sterling,” Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence, Eds. Kerry, Pionke, and Dent, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018, pp. 293-304.
• “’Horn-Handed and Pig-Headed’: British Reception of The Poets and Poetry of America,” Philosophy and Literature 41.2 (October 2017): 319-37.
• “Recognizing Status in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times,” Dickens Studies Annual 48 (2017): 145-66.
• “William North’s The City of the Jugglers and the ‘conventional necessity’ of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 47.2 (Summer 2015): 158-75.
• “Excavating Victorian Cuba in the British Periodicals Database.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47.3 (Fall 2014): 369-97.
• “The Epistemological Problem of British India in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would Be King,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 42.3 (September 2014): 335-50.
• “Erotic, Prosodic, and Ethical-Aesthetic Forms of Triangulation in Augusta Webster’s Dramatic Studies and A Women Sold and Other Poems,” Victorian Poetry 51.4 (Winter 2013): 465-85.  Reprint in “Julia Augusta Webster,” Poetry Criticism 184.  Farmington Hill, MI: Gale Cengage Learning, 2016.  306-17.
• “A Pedagogical Experiment in Crowdsourcing and Enumerative Bibliography,” Journal on Excellence in College Teaching 24.2 (2013): 5-22.
• “The Spiritual Economy of ‘Goblin Market,’” SEL: Studies in English Literature 52.4 (Autumn 2012): 897-917.
• “The Art of Manliness: Ekphrasis and/as Masculinity in George MacDonald’s Phantastes,” Studies in the Novel 43.1 (Spring 2011): 21-37.
• “Victorian Secrecy: An Introduction,” Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment, Eds. Pionke and Millstein, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2010, pp. 1-14.
• “Navigating ‘those terrible meshes of the Law’: Legal Realism in Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm and The Eustace Diamonds,” ELH 77.1 (Spring 2010): 129-57.
• “A Ritual Failure: The Eglinton Tournament, the Victorian Medieval Revival and Victorian Ritual Culture,” Studies in Medievalism XVI (2008): 25-45.
• “‘I do swear’: Oath-Taking among the Elite Public in Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 49.4 (Summer 2007): 611-34.
• “Degrees of Secrecy in Dickens’s Historical Fiction,” Dickens Studies Annual 38 (2007): 35-54.
• “Beyond ‘The Hero as Prophet’: A Survey of Images of Islam in Carlyle’s Works,” Literature and Belief25.1&2 (2005): 497-511.
• “Reframing the Luddites: Materialist and Idealist Models of Self in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley,” Victorian Review 30.2 (2004): 81-102.
• ‘“A sweet ‘Quod erat demonstrandum!’”: The Poetics of Parody in Constance Naden’s “Scientific Wooing,” CEAMAGazine 15 (2002): 3-11.  Reprint in “Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden,” Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism 313.  Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning 2016.  300-303.
• “Carlylean Nature,” Carlyle Studies Annual 20 (2001-2002): 7-26.
• “Secreting Rebellion: From the Mutiny to the Moonstone,” Victorians Institute Journal 28 (2000): 109-40.
• “Combining the Two Nations: Trade Unions as Secret Societies, 1837-45,” Victorian Newsletter 97 (Spring 2000): 1-14.

Digital Humanities Scholarship

• Editorial Apparatus (“Editorial Introduction,” Bibliographic Introduction to and Timeline of the Life of William North,” “A Sketch of Frank Bellew,” “Bibliography”) for The City of the Jugglers, by William North.  COVE.  Gen. ed. Dino Franco Felluga.
• Mill Marginalia Online.
• Articles about the Indian Mutiny in Victorian Periodicals. The Victorian Web. Ed. George Landow.
• “John Stuart Mill’s marginalia tells us much about the great thinker’s mind.” The Conversation (30 April 2018)
• “The Multiple, Marginal John Stuart Mills.” The Victorian Web. Ed. George Landow.
• “Representations of the Indian Mutiny in Victorian Higher Journalism.” The Victorian Web. Ed. George Landow.
• “Secret Societies” by Thomas De Quincey. The Victorian Web. Ed. George Landow.
• Tract 80 of Tracts for the Times. The Victorian Web. Ed. George Landow.

Reviews and Review Essays

• Published in Carlyle Studies Annual, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, Victorian Studies, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, and Victorians Institute Journal