Colton Valentine

Colton Valentine is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is a critic and literary historian of the long nineteenth century, with particular interests in the novel, translation, and sexuality. His first monograph—Between Languages: Queer Multilingualism in the British Belle Époque (under contract with Princeton University Press)—studies how late-Victorian authors read, wrote, and loved across multiple languages. His second book project—On Neutrality: Aesthetics, Politics, Critics—maps the relationships between the commitments to disinterest in art, liberalism, and international relations.

His academic work has recently appeared in Representations, ELH, MLQ, Victorian Studies, and Victorian Poetry, and his public criticism in The Drift, Bookforum, and The New Yorker among other venues. His book-length translation, Vernon Lee’s Cosmopolitan Prose, is forthcoming with MHRA. With Eve Houghton, he is co-editing a special issue of Narrative on free indirect style in languages other than English, and with Tara K. Menon he is the co-chair of the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Victorian Literature and Culture Seminar.

Valentine received his Ph.D. in English from Yale University, an M.St. in English from the University of Oxford, an M1 and M2 in Théorie de la littérature co-hosted by the École normale supérieure, Paris Sorbonne IV, and École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and an A.B. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.

A full CV is available here.