Daniel Hack

Daniel Hack

Fellow: Awarded 2022
Field of Study: Literary Criticism

Competition: US & Canada

Daniel Hack’s work explores the situatedness and mobility of literary texts and tropes, from the significance of a text’s original publication format to the poetics and politics of transnational circulation and cross-racial repurposing. He is the author of two books: The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2005), which shows how Victorian novelists sought to turn their work’s potentially troubling implication in the material world into a source of meaning and cultural authority; and Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (Princeton University Press, 2017), which reveals the scope and importance of African American writers’ and editors’ engagements with contemporary British literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His current project analyzes the rise of meaningfulness as a central aesthetic, ethical, and affective value in modern life, focusing in particular on the role of the novel in both modeling and critiquing the application of fiction’s meaning-making logic to lived experience.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, Hack is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and co-editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture.

Photo Credit: Matthew Hack

Scroll to Top