Dr. Nora Gilbert

UNT Faculty Profile

Department of English

Nora Gilbert jointly specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and twentieth-century American film, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Women's and Gender Studies program. Her first book, Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship (Stanford University Press, 2013), is a comparative exploration of the perversely paradoxical ways in which the novels written during the Victorian era and the films produced under the Production Code were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them. Her second book, Gone Girls: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the British Novel, 1684-1901, will be published in 2023 by Oxford University Press, and she is currently at work on a third book that is tentatively titled Unwomaned: Hollywood Stardom and the Threat of Female Independence. Recent journal articles and book chapters include "Sex, Race, and Diaper Pins in Shirley Temple's Baby Burlesks" (in The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture, 2020); "Sex and the Storyworld: Narrativizing Desirability in the Early Films of Fred Astaire" (JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory, 2018); "Impatient to be Gone: Aphra Behn's Vindication of the Flights of Women" (Eighteenth-Century Life, 2018), "Lilith on the Moors: The Bronte Sisters' Runaway Women" (Victorian Review, 2016), and "Out of the Pasts: Reading Victorian Sensation Fiction through the Lens of Hollywood Film Noir" (Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 2016).