Daniel Hack

Daniel Hack’s work asks how literary texts move through the world and how this very distinction between text and world has been constructed, contested, and imbued with meaning. He is the author of two books: The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2005), which shows how Victorian novelists sought to turn their work’s potentially troubling implication in the material world as physical objects and commodities into a source of literary value and cultural authority; and Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (Princeton University Press, 2017), which reveals the scope and importance of African American writers’ and editors’ repurposings and rewritings of contemporary British literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His current project considers different ways of understanding the relationship between the meaning-making practices and logic of novels and those of real life, a topic he locates within a broader story about the rise of meaningfulness as a central aesthetic, ethical, and affective value in modern life. 

Topics of recent graduate and undergraduate courses include Fiction and Reality, Novel Readers: the Real and the Fictional, Reading for the Plot, Fiction and the Meaning of Life, Race and Transatlantic Print Culture, and the Victorian Novel.

Selected fellowships and awards

Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 2022

Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement, Council of Editors of Learned Journals, 2021, for Victorian Literature and Culture

Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, University of Michigan English Department, 2021

Honorable Mention, Best Book of the Year, North American Victorian Studies Association, 2018, for Reaping Something New

Honorable Mention, Best Special Issue, Council of Editors of Learned Journals, for “Keywords” issue of Victorian Literature and Culture (46.3/4), 2018

Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in Victorian studies, North American Victorian Studies Association, 2012, for “Wild Charges: The Afro-Haitian ‘Charge of the Light Brigade,’” Victorian Studies 54:2

Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, University of Michigan, 2011–12

Honorable Mention, Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in Victorian studies, 2008, for “Close Reading at a Distance: The African-Americanization of Bleak House,” Critical Inquiry 34:4