Virginia Zimmerman

Virginia Zimmerman is Professor of English at Bucknell University. She specializes in Victorian literature and culture and in children's and YA literature from the 19th century to the present.

Professor Zimmerman's scholarly works address the intersection of material culture and time, whether in poems about archaeology or in children's books. Dr. Zimmerman's essays have appeared in Victorian Studies, Children's Literature, Configurations, the Journal of Literature & Science, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorians Institute Journal, Pedagogy, and The Lion and the Unicorn, as well as recent collections published by MLA, Cambridge, Palgrave, Routledge, and Manchester UP. Her book Excavating Victorians was published by SUNY press in 2008.

Professor Zimmerman also writes children's fiction: La Finestra del Temps (Cruïlla 2012), The Rosemary Spell (HMH/Clarion Books 2015) and PINK! A Women’s March Story (Running Press 2022).

Educational Background

• Ph.D., Virginia

Teaching Interests

• Victorian literature and culture
• Young adult fiction and children's literature
• The nineteenth-century novel
• Nineteenth-century women's literature
• Children and immigration

Scholarly Interests

• Victorian literature
• Children's literature
• Science and literature
• Serial publication

Current Projects and Research Interests

Child-authored serials and non-linear experiences of time

Recent Awards

• Presidential Professorship 2022–25
• Bucknellian Faculty of the Year 2021
• NEH Chair in the Humanities 2013–16
• Scadden Fellowship 2010
• Presidential Award for Teaching Excellence 2009

Selected Publications

“Time In-Between: Intra-temporality and Coming of Age in Dickens and Nesbit.” Victorian Studies 65.3 (forthcoming).

“Being Editors: Childhood Over Time.” Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods. Michelle Smith and Kristine Moruzi, eds. Literary Cultures and Childhoods Series, Lynne Vallone, series ed. Palgrave: forthcoming 2023.

“Texts in Time: Periodical and Serial Publishing for Children.” The Cambridge History of Children's Literature in English, Volume 2: 1830-1914. (ed. by Eugene Giddens and Zoe Jaques) Cambridge UP: forthcoming.

PINK! A Women’s March Story (Running Press Kids 2022).

"The YA Critical Edition Project," Teaching Young Adult Literature. (ed. by Karen Coats, Mike Cadden, and Roberta Seelinger Trites). MLA: 2020.

"Bringing Egypt Home: Children's Encounters with Egypt in the Long Nineteenth Century." Pasts at Play: Childhood Encounters with History in British Culture, 1750- 1914 (ed. by Rachel Bryant Davies and Barbara Gribling) Manchester UP: 2020.

"Excavating Children – Archaeological Imagination and Time Slip in the Early 1900's." Excavating Modernity, Physical, Temporal and Psychological Stratification in Literature, 1900-1930 (ed. by Eleanor Dobson and Gemma King). Routledge: 2019.

The Rosemary Spell. A novel for young readers. New York: Clarion Books, 2015.

"The Curating Child: Runaways and Museums in Children's Fiction." The Lion and the Unicorn (2015).

La Finestra del Temps. A novel for young readers. Barcelona: Cruïlla, 2012. (translated into Catalan).

"Natural History on Blocks, in Bodies, and on the Hearth: Juvenile Science Literature and Games, 1850-1875."Configurations 19 (2011) 407-30.

"'The Weird Message of the Past': Material Epistemologies of Past, Present, and Future in the Nineteenth Century." Victorian Periodicals Review. 42.2 (2009) 114-135.

"Harry Potter and the Gift of Time" Children's Literature 37 (2009). 194-215.

Excavating Victorians. SUNY Press, 2008.

"Moving Poems: Kinesthetic learning in the Literature Classroom." Pedagogy, 2002