Professor Emeritus

PeterLoganHeadshot-200x300.jpg

peter.logan@temple.edu 914 Anderson Hall 1114 Polett Walk Philadelphia PA 19122 Expertise Cultural Theory, 19th-Century British Literature, History of the Novel, Digital Humanities, Victorian Literature, Interdisciplinary Studies

Peter Logan is Professor of English and Academic Director of the Digital Scholarship Center of Temple Libraries. He teaches Victorian literature, critical theory, and courses in digital research methods. His published research looks at intersections between literature and nineteenth-century ideas about psychology derived from the histories of medicine and anthropology. He is working on two research projects. The first is a study of beliefs about Victorian psychological disorders — hysteria, delusion, hallucination — and their relationship to the writing of Charles Dickens. The second examines the changes in the conceptualization of knowledge as represented by historical editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. A former Director of the Center for the Humanities at Temple (2009-15), he joined the English Department at Temple in 2004 and received his B.A. and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.

Selected Publications

Books:

  • Logan, Peter Melville, General Editor; Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal, Associate Editors. Encyclopedia of the Novel, 2 vols. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
  • Logan, Peter Melville. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
  • Logan, Peter Melville. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose. Foreword by Roy Porter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Selected Journal Articles:

  • Logan, Peter Melville. “Primitive Criticism and the Novel: G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine on Dickens,” Victorian Literature and Culture (in press).
  • Logan, Peter Melville. “On Culture: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, 1869.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. 2012.
  • Logan, Peter. “On Culture: Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, 1871.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. 2012.
  • Logan, Peter Melville. “Literature and Medicine: Twenty-Five Years Later.” Literature Compass 5.5 (2008): 964-80.
  • Logan, Peter Melville. “Fetishism and Freedom in Matthew Arnold’s Cultural Theory.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.2 (2003): 555-574.
  • Logan, Peter Melville. “The Popularity of Popular Delusions: Charles Mackay and Victorian Popular Culture.” Cultural Critique 54 (Spring 2003): 213-241.

Courses Taught

  • Realism and the Victorian Novel
  • Seminar on George Eliot
  • Seminar on Charles Dickens
  • Seminar on Matthew Arnold
  • Victorian Cultural Theory
  • Victorian Poetry
  • Literary Theory
  • Survey of the British Literature, 1660-1900
  • History of the Novel