Born in the Netherlands, Janine Barchas (Stanford B.A. and Chicago Ph.D.) joined the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, after teaching at the University of Auckland in New Zealand for five years.
Professor Barchas combines book history with literary criticism in both her research and teaching. Her work exhibits a material turn. She has twice been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and has received the Alpha of Texas Award for Distinction in Teaching from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her first book, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge UP, 2003), won the SHARP prize for best work in the field of book history. This was followed by Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012). In addition, Barchas has published academic articles in journals such as ELH, Review of English Studies, Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Persuasions, and Modern Philology. She also writes pieces for the popular press, including essays in the New York Times, Washington Post, Lit Hub, and Los Angeles Review of Books.