November 2025 Featured Scholar

Dr. Marta Kvande (Associate Professor, Department of English)

What are you watching/streaming?

It’s fall as I’m writing this, so of course I’m watching my beloved Philadelphia Eagles. I’ve also been watching Task, another series by the creator of Mare of Easttown. At opposite ends of the spectrum, I’ve also recently watched Chernobyl and the delightfully trashy Decameron.

What games are you playing?

Competition is not really my thing.

What are you listening to?

I tend to put my music collection on shuffle play and enjoy the randomness. Carsie Blanton is a current favorite, though.

What are you reading?

As usual, everything I can get my hands on. A few recent reads I really enjoyed: Bender & Hanna’s The AI Con, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (a re-read), Everett’s James, Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, and Dazai’s No Longer Human. And don’t laugh, but I’ve finally now read War and Peace!

What are you writing/thinking about?

I’m finishing up (hopefully) a couple of projects: an edition of The Female American for the Oxford World’s Classics series and a book project on how eighteenth-century British novels addressed media panic about print and its effects on readers: I’m arguing that novels developed specific strategies to make reading printed fiction feel safe, and that those eighteenth-century strategies were foundational to the Anglophone novel genre as we understand it.