About Me

Dr. Nicole Lobdell is an Associate Professor of English at Louisiana Scholars’ College (the state’s honors college) at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at DePauw University in Indiana. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Georgia.

With expertise in 19th-century British literature and culture, Lobdell teaches a range of courses with interests in biography studies, genre and poetics, gender and sexuality studies, health humanities, and science fiction studies.

She is the author of X-RAY (2024) in Bloomsbury’s popular Object Lessons series and co-editor of the Broadview Press edition of H.G. Wells’s 1897 The Invisible Man (2018). She is currently working on Stranger than Fiction: The First Biography of Mary Shelley about a semi-secret Victorian proto-biography of Mary Shelley.

In 2026, she received NSU’s Dr. Mildred Hart Bailey Award for Faculty Research, which recognizes excellence in faculty research, and a short-term fellowship at the Huntington Library to support her research for Stranger than Fiction. In 2025, she received an NEH Summer Stipend to support a two-month archival research trip, and in 2024, she was the Huntington Fellow at Lincoln College at Oxford (UK).

She serves as editor of the interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth Century Studies.

Please visit the CV page for more information.

Contact

Email: lobdelln@nsula.edu

Cover Images in rotation:

Reading Girl, Gustav Adolphe Hennig, 1828

Young Girl Reading the Qaran, Osman Hamdi Bey, 1880

Woman Reading, Felix Vallotton, 1915

At the Breakfast Table with the Morning Newspaper, L. A. Ring, 1898

A Lady Reading, Gwen John, 1909-11

The Library, Elizabeth Shippen Green, 1905

Dreams, Vittorio Matteo Corcos, 1896

Reading at a Table, Pablo Picasso, 1934