Hao Li

I work in the intersection of Victorian literature and nineteenth-century intellectual history, with a particular focus on ethics. My research involves issues of genre and disciplinarity in relation to nineteenth-century non-fictional prose, philosophy and the novel, aesthetics and the mind, and literature and science. I teach undergraduate courses in Victorian fiction, prose, and poetry and graduate seminars on ethics and the modalities of Victorian intellectual discourse, George Eliot, the aesthetic and decadent movements, and memory and history in Victorian literary works.

Publications

Apart from Memory and History in George Eliot: Transfiguring the Past (Palgrave Macmillan), I have published on language in the work of George Eliot (The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, edited by John Rignall); William Whewell, Kant, and practical universalism (Victorian Ethics, edited by Nathan Uglow); the deployment of ethics in Victorian literary and philosophical writings (Literature Compass); critical vigilance and the ethics of cross-cultural reading (Cambridge Quarterly); George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and British ethical idealism (Literature Compass); vision and self-consciousness in The Picture of Dorian Gray (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature); and Victorian periodical publishing and the formation of ethos in ethical debates (Victorian Periodicals Review).

Current Research

A project exploring ethos and ethics in several late Victorian authors (Water Pater, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and Thomas Hardy), and another project on the ways in which Victorian studies of language helped shape modern discourses of ethics. I welcome inquiries from students wishing to pursue graduate work in my areas of expertise.