Catherine Gallagher
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Eggers Professor of English Literature, University of California at Berkeley

Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Fall 2010

Catherine Gallagher is a literary scholar working on the cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as on the historiography and theory of the novel. Her books include The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 2006), Practicing New Historicism, co-authored with Stephen Greenblatt (Chicago, 2000), Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (California, 1994), and The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form (Chicago, 1985).

 

Gallagher has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. She is a founding member of the editorial board of the journal Representations. Gallagher has served as a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, on the advisory board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and is currently a member of the board of trustees of the National Humanities Center.

Project Description

The Way It Wasn’t: Counterfactual History and the Alternate-History Novel

During her time at the American Academy in Berlin, Gallagher explored the rise of two closely related phenomena: counterfactual history and the alternate-history novel. A historical practice with a long but little-known provenance, counterfactual history attempts to examine the past by determining what might have followed if certain key historical events had happened differently. Alternate-history novels explore the minds and fates of private (and fictional) characters living within such counterfactual historical worlds. (Philip Roth’s successful novel The Plot Against America, for example, is based on the counterfactual premise that if Charles Lindberg had run for US president in 1940, he would have won). Gallagher’s study traces these hypothetical and speculative modes of thinking and writing about history back to the seventeenth century and investigates their huge increase in popularity in the late twentieth century. This popularity, she suggests, tells us a great deal about the state of our collective historical imagination.

Back To Top