Department of English

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Professor
PhD, McMaster University

Office: Jorgenson 1011
Phone: 416-979-5000 ext 7420
E-mail: ljanzen@ryerson.ca

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra joined Ryerson University as Professor of English and faculty member in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture in 2005; currently, she is serving as the English Undergraduate Program Director. She is also a participating faculty member in the Book History and Print Culture Program at the University of Toronto. Previously, she taught at Nipissing University and McMaster University and was a SSHRC Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. A specialist in Victorian illustrated books, her research focuses on visual/verbal relations, print culture and publishing history, with special emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and the 1890s. Secondary interests include poetry, women’s writing, children’s literature, and the digital humanities. Assisted by a SSHRC standard research grant, she has just published a new monograph, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture 1855-1875. In collaboration with Dennis Denisoff, she is working on a SSHRC-funded project in the digital humanities, The Yellow Book, 1890s Print Culture, and the Digital Vision (awarded 2011). She is Co-Director of Ryerson's Centre for Digital Humanities and a PI on the Children's Literature Archive team. Lorraine teaches undergraduate classes in Fairy Tales and Fantasy and 19C Literature and Culture, and a graduate course in Ryerson’s MA in Literatures of Modernity in 19th Century Visual Culture; in all her classes, she enjoys investigating issues of verbal/visual relations and publishing history. Her views on illustration may be accessed in Victorian Word and Image, an MLA Podcast Documentary produced by Sally Placksin with Nancy Armstrong, Kate Flint, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, at http://www.mla.org/radio_show_234.

View creative assignments in image, word, and text by Graduate Students in her 19th Century Visual Culture Class.

View digital projects by undergraduate students in her Fairy Tales and Fantasies course at http://www.ryerson.ca/childrenslit/project_gallery.html  and at http://eng222f11.blog.ryerson.ca/

Websites

Centre for Digital Humanities. www.ryerson.ca/cdh

Children's Literature Archive. www.ryerson.ca/childrenslit

The Yellow Nineties Online. www.1890s.ca

Selected Book Publications

• Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture 1855-1875. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011.
• Guest Editor of special issue Victorian Poetry and the Book Arts, Victorian Poetry 48.1 (2010).
• Learning to See in the Dark. Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 2003.
• Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002.
• The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts. Ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Athens: Ohio UP, 1999.
• The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.

 Selected Articles and Book Chapters

• A Modern Poetry of Sensation: Three Christmas Gift Books and the Legacy of Victorian Material Culture.” Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. Ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley. Aldershot: Ashgate 2011. 107-136.
•  “From Blake to Beardsley: ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry.” Introduction to special issue on Victorian Poetry and the Book Arts, ed. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Victorian Poetry 48.1 (2010): 1-9.
• Electronic Scholarship’s Back End: The Epic/Epoch of The Yellow Book Online, Vol. 1.” Co-authored with Constance Crompton. Yellow Nineties Online (2010). www.1890s.ca
• “A Modern Illustrated Magazine: The Yellow Book’s Poetics of Format.” Illustrative Matters: Optics and Objects in 19C Literary and Visual Culture, ed. Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 128-144.