Biography
Hannah LeClair’s research on literature and visual culture focuses on the realist novel’s visual rhetorics, and her current book project examines landscape, setting, and the afterlife of picturesque aesthetics in the nineteenth-century novel. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she held a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship and was the recipient of a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the university’s College of Arts and Sciences. Before joining the faculty at Appalachian State University, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Ursinus College and, previously, an instructor at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Dr. LeClair has published in The Hardy Society Journal, and her writing on contemporary fiction and poetry appears Jacket2, Music & Literature, and elsewhere.
Website
www.hannah-leclair.com
Research Interests
Aesthetics; British Literature – 19th Century; Critical Theory; Environmental Humanities; History and Theory of the Novel; Poetry & Poetics; Romanticism; Victorian Studies; Visual Culture
Education
Ph.D., Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania
M.A., Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania
B.A., Language & Literature, Bard College
Monograph in Progress
Renovated Landscapes: Novelistic Realism after the Picturesque
Selected Publications
“On the Hardy Tree, or Living Form: Aesthetics, Infrastructure, and the Gothic,” The Hardy Society Journal, vol. 20.2, Summer 2024.
Review: Jana Prikryl’s Midwood (Norton, 2022) and Kerri Webster’s Lapis (Wesleyan, 2022), Jacket2, online.
Recent Presentations
“Dickens’ Civic Picturesque: From the Periodical Sketch to Bleak House.” RSVP 2025 Conference, Chicago, IL. (July 2025).
“Hardy’s Visualities: Text and Image in Under the Greenwood Tree.” ACLA 2024 Conference, Montréal, Canada. (March 2024)
“‘My find; my piece-work’: Feminist Poetics in Conversation with Dorothy Wordsworth.” ACLA 2023 Conference, Chicago, IL. (March 2023)
“‘Ruined lands in every shire’: Landscape, Property, and the Picturesque in Bleak House.” NAVSA 2022 Conference, Bethlehem, PA. (September 2022)
"Dutch Paintings, Description, and Realist Form: Hardy’s Pictorialism in Under the Greenwood Tree." 25th International Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival. Dorchester, UK. (July 2022)
Fall 2025 Classes
ENG 2020-101/102: British Literature Since 1789
ENG 5880-101: Victorian Futures
