Dr. Claudia Johnson

Biography

Claudia L. Johnson joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1994 and served as Chair of the English Department from 2004 to 2012. She specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel. In addition to her courses on the eighteenth century, she teaches gothic fiction, sentimentality, melodrama, the history of prose style, film adaptations of novels, detective fiction, and works related to Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen. Johnson has strong research interests in various fields, including eighteenth-century music culture, the idea of voice, letterpress printing, the Yiddish story, and the American Songbook from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as international modernism. Her book 'Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures' (Chicago, 2012) won the Christian Gauss Award in 2013. She has also published collaborations like 'Jane Austen’s Beautifull Cassandra' (Princeton, 2018) with artist Leon Steinmetz and '30 Great Myths of Jane Austen' (Blackwell, 2020) with Clara Tuite. Johnson has authored several other significant works, such as 'Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen' and 'Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft.' Additionally, she has a keen interest in textual scholarship and has prepared editions of Austen's 'Mansfield Park,' 'Sense and Sensibility,' 'Northanger Abbey' (with Susan Wolfson), and 'Pride and Prejudice.' Her research is supported by major fellowships from the NEH and Guggenheim. Currently, Johnson is working on the Regency diarist Anne Lister and the role of women in the invention of international modernism.

Research Interests