About Me

Dr. Nicole Lobdell is an Associate Professor of English in the honors college at Northwestern State University and editor of the journal Nineteenth Century Studies. She holds a PhD and MA in English from the University of Georgia and a BA in English from Rhodes College.

Her specialties are 19th‑century British literature and culture with interests in textual and material studies, biography, gender and sexuality studies, the history of science and technology, health humanities, and science fiction studies.

She wrote X‑ray (2024) in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series and co‑edited an edition of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) for Broadview Press in 2018. Her current book project is titled Stranger than Fiction: The First Biography of Mary Shelley, a study of a little‑known Victorian biography of Mary Shelley.

Recent awards and fellowships include NSU’s Dr. Mildred Hart Bailey Award for Faculty Research (2026); a Huntington Library short‑term fellowship (2026); an NEH Summer Stipend for archival research (2025); and a Huntington Fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford (2024).

See her CV for more details.

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