School of Writing, Literature, and Film

Megan Ward teaches courses on British literature from 1800 to the present, the history of the novel, and children’s literature and also directs the M.A. program in English. Her research investigates how realist novels have influenced culture from the Victorian period to the present. Her first book, Seeming Human: Victorian Realist Characters and Artificial Intelligence (Ohio State UP, 2018) offers a new theory of realist character through the realist novel’s unexpected afterlife: the intelligent machine. Professor Ward’s current research focuses on the under-examined effects of realism on the formation of institutional museums and archives in the nineteenth century – a connection that suggests that realist character may offer new ways to write the marginalized subjects often thought to be lost to archival histories. She is also currently at work on a book of essays for a broader audience about what it means – and how it feels – to be real.

Her work on realism has also appeared or is forthcoming in edited collections such as AI Narratives and The Routledge Guide to Politics and Literature as well as journals such as Genre, Configurations, and SEL: Studies in English Literature. She is also Co-Director of Livingstone Online, an NEH-funded digital archive of the Victorian explorer David Livingstone and has published writing on the Victorian antecedents of contemporary culture for general audiences in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.