Rate My Professor Mary Jean Corbett

Mary Jean Corbett is University Distinguished Professor of English in the Department of English at Miami University, where she joined the faculty in 1989 following the completion of her Ph.D. in English from Stanford University that same year. She holds an A.B. magna cum laude with High Honors in English from Smith College (1984). Named John W. Steube Professor of English, Corbett is an affiliate of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program and has served as Interim Chair of the English Department. She teaches nineteenth-century British literature and culture, along with additional graduate and undergraduate courses in her field.

Corbett’s research focuses on Victorian literature, Anglo-Irish literary relations, marriage and family dynamics in fiction, and Virginia Woolf’s engagement with late-Victorian essayists. She is the author of three monographs: Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), which examines political and familial allegories in literature spanning the Acts of Union; Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Cornell University Press, 2008), exploring incest motifs and marriage plots; and Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf and the Essayists’ Revival (Ohio State University Press, 2015), supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in the Novel and encyclopedias like The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, including “New Woman Fiction” (2015). Corbett has received the Miami University Distinguished Scholar Award (2014), Faculty Women’s Leadership Award from the Miami University Women’s Center, and Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities for her dissertation (1988–1989). Her scholarship contributes significantly to Victorian studies, feminist criticism, and modernist literary history, influencing discussions on gender, nationalism, and narrative form. She has also coordinated scholarly publishing workshops and op-ed programs at Miami University.