BOOKS

• Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford UP, 2025).
  Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism tracks Victorians' skeptical romance with the microscope, from a time when microscopists struggled for scientific authority, to one where the microscope had become an icon of modernity, science, and popular culture. Writing Embodiment argues that Victorian microscopists saw observation as a deeply embodied practice, where images are derived from a dynamic, unstable system linking the bodies of observer, instrument, apparatus, and object. I show how this iconic instrument sparked important questions about optics, the senses, and scientific practice even as it enjoyed a surprisingly carnivalesque appeal in popular culture.
• Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medicine and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2010; paperback, 2016.

RECENT ARTICLES

• "Oliver as Object: Character, Genre, and Agency in the Victorian Novel.” Victorian Review 49.2 (2024): 301-320.
• "Diagnosis.” Victorian Literature and Culture, 51.3 (Sept 2023), pp. 383–86.
• “‘Throes and struggles . . . witnessed with painful distinctness’: The oxy-hydrogen microscope, performing science, and the projection of the moving image.” Victorian Studies 62.1 (Autumn 2019): 85-118.
• "Tono-Bungay and Burroughs Wellcome: Branding Imperial PopularMedicine." Victorian Literature and Culture 45.1 (2017): 137-62.

RECENT BOOK CHAPTERS

• “Water-tigers, jam-pots, and 'Ye Mikroskopiker's Arms': Boundary-work and boundary objects in comic microscopy,” 39pp essay accepted for Humor Across Victoriana (part of Routledge series, Humor in Literature and Culture), edited by Mou-Lan Wong and James Whitehead. London: Routledge. In press.
• “Circulation and Civility: Mid-Victorian Botany and Microscopical Method.” In The Victorians: A Botanical Perspective, ed. Luís Manuel Mendonça de Carvalho vol. 1. (Cham (Switzerland): Springer Nature, 2024): 131-66.
• “Writing realism in nineteenth-century British literature and medicine,” in Literature and Medicine: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Mangham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Forthcoming.
• "Technology," in Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science, ed. John Robert Holmes and Sharon Ruston; afterword by Bernard Lightman. NY: Routledge, Spring 2017, pp. 311-28.
• "'Discriminating the minuter beauties of nature': Botany as Natural Theology in a Victorian Medical School," in Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age, ed. Shalyn Claggett and Lara Karpenko; foreword by Gillian Beer. Ann Arbor: U Mich P., 2017, pp. 40-61.

CURRENT RESEARCH

I am currently completing a book titled “Test Objects in Victorian Microscopy.” This book is the second of a planned four-book project examining Victorian microscopy as an intellectual, practical, and social space where questions of sense and representation come to the fore. In “Test Objects” I will show how test objects functioned differently in different contexts. Test objects powered experts’ efforts to standardize scientific practice, but these objects also attracted and trained novices, circulated broadly in popular culture, and triggered contentious debates amongst the most elite microscopists about the very basics of their practice. 

With Piers Hale (Deisenroth Presidential Professor, University of Oklahoma, History of Science), I am also series co-editor of Routledge Historical Resources: Nineteenth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine. This project is a peer-reviewed print and online resource curating an extensive range of Victorian-era primary sources, with critical essays introducing each volume and set. The collection is being published as print volumes and ebooks and will be available in a large online database including also a selection of relevant scholarship from the Taylor & Francis backlist (Routledge, Palgrave, Ashgate, Bloomsbury, Pickering & Chatto, etc.), with new critical essays and videos. The project currently involves 202 volumes spanning 64 topics from 71 contributors. The first commissioned sets were published in 2023; publication is ongoing.

Please check out my website, https://meegankennedy.net/, for more information.