Bernadette Guthrie

Bernadette Guthrie is the most recent recipient of the Joseph F. Martino Lectureship in Undergraduate Teaching. Her research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century British poetry and prose, critical theory, the relationship between literature, religion, and secularization, and the interconnection between technology and knowledge production.

Her dissertation, Untimely Interference: Anachronistic Temporalities in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, which she defended in the summer of 2015, challenges long-standing narratives of nineteenth-century poetry in general, and Romantic poetry in particular, as representative of a progressive modernization and secularization of pre-modern, religiously-inflected understandings of subjectivity, nature, and knowledge. Untimely Interference contends that pre-modern social forms paradoxically subsisted as powerful and disruptive forces in the nineteenth century in and through their haunting absence; specifically, the project examines how poems by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are shaped by their varied ways of marking the absence of these social forms. Untimely Interference concludes by linking the historical situation of nineteenth-century British poetry to the present “obsolescence” of the humanities. By attending to present reading practices in the humanities, especially the computer-aided practices explored by the digital humanities, Untimely Interference argues that these practices allow the discipline to press against the “epochal” temporality of modernity and towards a relationship to literary history that embraces what Alan Liu has termed the “unknown within the known.”

Bernadette is the recipient of two teaching awards from Cornell’s Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines and has served as a co-facilitator for the Knight Institute’s pedagogy course for new writing teachers. In the 2014-15 academic year, she served as a HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) scholar. Her work has been presented at NASSR and ACLA, among other conferences.  Her article “Invoking Derrida: Specters of Presence in Film and Print” appeared in New Literary History.