Dr. Margaret Homans

Biography

Margaret Homans is the Bird White Housum Professor of English at Yale University, specializing in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and her B.A. from the same institution in 1974. Homans practices feminist and queer literary criticism, focusing on Romantic poetry and the contemporary novel. Her work aims to mediate polarized views of human identity, particularly regarding gender as a core aspect of the human subject, questioning its social and cultural construction. Her research engages with narratives of adoption, exploring how these narratives intersect with contexts of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality. She has published several significant works, including 'Bearing Word: Language and the Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing' and 'Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and Victorian Culture, 1837-1876.' Homans teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on figures such as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, feminist thought, and Victorian literature, alongside graduate seminars on feminist criticism and theory.

Research Interests