Constance Harsh

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Constance Harsh

Rebecca S. Chopp Chair in the Humanities; Professor of English

Department/Office Information

English and Creative Writing
301 Lathrop Hall
  • M 11:15am - 12:00pm (100 Hamilton Street Classroom)
  • R 1:00pm - 3:00pm (301 Lathrop Hall)

Contact

(315) 228-7294

Constance Harsh has been a professor at Colgate since 1988 and has served in a variety of leadership posts, including the position of Interim Dean of the Faculty and Provost. She has taught courses in the history of the novel, Victorian fiction, the Brontës, the female protagonist, and introductory literary study. As a longtime instructor in the Core, she has taught the modernity course in the various forms that it has taken since her arrival. Her research specialty is Victorian fiction, and her recent focus has been the fiction of George Gissing, particularly his representation of women’s subjectivity. 

BA, MA, PhD, University of Pennsylvania

19th-century British fiction

  • Victorian fiction
  • George Gissing 
  • John Cowper Powys
  • British fiction of the 1890s
  • Late-Victorian publishing and reviewing practices
  • Interim Dean of the Faculty and Provost, 2015-17 
  • Chair of the Department of English, 2014-2015, 2019-
  • Director of the Division of University Studies, 2009-2013
  • Co-Chair, Middle States Self-Study (2008 reaccreditation)
  • University Professor and Chair of Core 152, “Challenges of Modernity,” 1996-1998
  • University Professor and Chair of GNED 102, “The Challenge of Modernity,” 1994-1995
  • “’For Her Own Satisfaction Alone’? Dress in The Odd Women,” “Gissing in Vogue,” supplement to Gissing Journal 54.4 (2020): 9-10.
  • “The London Frame of Mind in Born in Exile,” Victoriographies 10 (2020): 165-76.
  • “‘Entirely to My Taste’: Gissing’s Reception of Charlotte Brontë,” A World within the World: George Gissing’s Vision of Art and Literature, ed. Maria Teresa Chialant, Emanuela Ettorre, and Christine Huguet (Rome: Aracne, 2018) 143-58. 
  • Gender, Type, and Individual Identity in Isabel Clarendon,” Gissing Journal 52 (2018): 27-37
  • “Gissing and Women in the 1890s: The Conditions and Consequences of Narrative Sympathy,” George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent, ed. Christine Huguet and Simon J. James (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) 29-39.
  • “Gissing and Religion: Some Aspects of His Use of Christianity in His Fiction,” Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination, ed. Christine Huguet ([Haren]: Equilibris, 2010) 217-36.
  • “Fantasies of Recuperation in Eve's Ransom,” Eve's Ransom: George Gissing e le sfide del romanzo tardo-vittoriano, ed. Maria Teresa Chialant, Studi di Anglistica 22 (Rome: Aracne, 2010) 67-82. 
  • “‘The Foolish Virgin’ and the One Thing Needful,” Spellbound, George Gissing, ed. Christine Huguet ([Haren]: Equilibris, 2008) II: 109-17.
  • A Sunless Heart, by Edith Johnstone (Peterborough: Broadview, 2008).
  • “The Ambivalently Modern Master: Hedges against the Modern in Meredith’s The Amazing Marriage,” ELT 48 (2005): 436-58. 
  • “The Text of Eve’s Ransom: Insights from the Illustrated London News Serialization,” Gissing Journal 41.3 (July 2005): 1-9.
  • “Flowers on the Dunghill in The Nether World,” Victorian Newsletter 102 (2002): 9-15.
  • “Eliza Lynn Linton as a New Woman Novelist,” The Rebel of the Family, ed. Deborah Meem (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002) 456-74.
  • “Putting Idiosyncrasy in Its Place: Michael Armstrong in Light of Trollope's Early Fiction,” Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change, ed. Brenda Ayres (Westport: Greenwood, 2002) 119-35.
  • "Women with Ideas: Gissing's The Odd Women and the New Woman Novel," A Garland for Gissing, ed. Bouwe Postmus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001) 81-89.
  • “Wrestling with Nietzsche: John Cowper Powys’s Engagement with Nietzsche in the Early Years  of the First World War,” Powys Journal 11 (2001): 63-81.
  • “Reviewing New Woman Fiction in the Daily Press: The Times, the Scotsman, and the Daily Telegraph,” Victorian Periodicals Review 34 (2001): 79-96. 
  • Subversive Heroines: Feminist Resolutions of Social Crisis in the Condition-of-England Novel (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994) 
  • “Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee and the Epistemology of Resistance,” SEL 34 (1994): 853-75. 
  • “George Gissing’s Thyrza: Romantic Love and Ideological Co-Conspiracy,” Gissing Journal 30 (1994): 1-12. 
  • “Effaced by History: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Reformulation of Scott,” Scott in Carnival, ed. J.H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: ASLSs, 1993) 530-42. 
  • “Gissing’s The Unclassed and the Perils of Naturalism,” ELH 59 (1992): 911-38.
  • “Christ and Satan: The Measured Power of Christ,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 90 (1989): 243-53.