Scholars@Hallwalls: Rachel Ablow

A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.

4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A

We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.

Belief as Culture: Flora Annie Steel’s Imperialist Postsecularism

This paper considers the complex imperial politics involved in regarding belief as bound up with culture—and so, too, the potential complicity of both universalizing and anti-universalizing gestures with justifications of empire. It is taken from a larger project entitled, “Compelling Feelings: Belief and Affect in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel,“ which examines nineteenth-century writers’ interest in the social, political, and psychic consequences of understanding belief as grounded in affective experience, and hence, too, in culture and history.

About Rachel Ablow

Rachel Ablow is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford, 2007) and Victorian Pain (Princeton, 2017). She is the editor of special issues of Representations (2019), Victorian Studies (2008), and Novel: A Forum on Fiction (forthcoming 2026) and a volume of essays entitled The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature (Michigan, 2010). She is co-editor of The Norton Anthology, Vol. E: The Victorian Age and the journal, Victorian Literature and Culture (2017–2023). She is Vice President of the North American Victorian Studies Association. Her work has appeared in Representations, Critical Inquiry, ELH, MLQ, Victorian Studies, and elsewhere.