Assistant Professor of English
Kira Braham joined the Lycoming English faculty in 2023. Her research and teaching interests include British literature and culture (especially Victorian literature), global Anglophone literatures, gender and sexuality studies, labor history and politics, working-class literatures, and science fiction.
Her current book project, “The Active Life: Work Ethics in Victorian Literature,” challenges the common understanding of work ethics as disciplinary mechanisms that produce docile capitalist subjects. Exploring a wide variety of Victorian fiction and nonfiction prose, the book exhibits the potential of work ethics to problematize exploitative labor conditions and articulate alternatives for a more equitable organization of human productivity. “Active Life” embraces a strategically presentist approach, placing Victorian authors like George Eliot and George Gissing in conversation with a twenty-first century discourse on the future of work. The book ultimately contends that Victorian conceptions of the meaning and value of work, far from being anachronistic, may prove a vital intellectual resource for reimagining labor politics in the twenty-first century.
Her work has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Literature Compass, and The Gissing Journal, as well as the SF fanzine Journey Planet. She also serves as an assistant editor with the digital humanities project Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, which develops resources to support antiracist and anticolonial teaching practices. To learn more, please visit https://undiscipliningvc.org/.