Dr. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Affiliations:
Fellow, Royal Society of Canada
Advisory Board Member, Ryerson Centre for Digital Humanities
Advisory Board Member, Central Online Victorian Educator (COVE)
Editorial Board Member, Orlando 2.0
Editorial Board Member, Victorian Review
Websites:
Yellow Nineties 2.0 (external link)
Biography:
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is Professor Emerita of English and founding co-Director Emerita of Ryerson’s Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH). She received her MA and PhD in English at McMaster University, where she was honoured with the Governor General’s Gold medal for her dissertation on illustration and the book arts in fin-de-siècle Britain. Her research focuses on Victorian illustrated books and periodicals with a particular interest in women's contributions to literature, visual art, and print culture She characterizes her subject as “the production of visual knowledge”– the ways in which the interaction of picture and word shape how readers interpret texts, conceptualize identities, and form cultural values – in other words, how they know about themselves and the world. Yellow Nineties 2.0 (external link) , an electronic resource for the study of 8 late-Victorian little magazines in the context of their production and reception, is the open-access publishing platform for the findings of her current SSHRC-funded research.
Janzen Kooistra's research and teaching have been recognized by the university’s highest awards in each area: the Sarwan Sahota Distinguished Scholar Award (2021) and the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016). Her innovative pedagogy resulted in the Ontario Confederation of Faculty Associations (OCUFA) Teaching Award (2013), and the Provost’s Experiential Teaching Award (2012).
Monographs
Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture 1855-1875. Ohio University Press, 2011.
Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Ohio University Press, 2003.
The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books. Scolar Press, 1995.
Selected Editions
The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Ohio University Press, 1999.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
“Fundamental Sympathy: The Gothic, the Fin-de-Siècle Printing Revival, and the Digital.” Journal of the William Morris Society. Special Issue on the 130th Anniversary of the Kelmscott Press, vol. 24, no. 1, 2020-2021, pp. 6-22.
“Case Studies in Illustration: Laurence Housman in The Yellow Book and The Field of Clover.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, vol. 29, Fall 2020, pp. 57-77.
“Floating Worlds: Wood Engraving and Women’s Poetry.” Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry, edited by Linda K. Hughes, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 277-98
“Victorian Women Wood Engravers: The Case of Clemence Housman.” Edinburgh
Companion to Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s: The Victorian Period, edited by Alexis Easley, Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 277-300.
“Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf: Querying Transgression, Seeking Trans/Formation.” Special issue on Trans Victorians in Victorian Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2018, pp. 51-64.
Wood-engraved Borders in Strahan’s Family Magazines: Toward a Grammar of Periodical Ornament.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 51, no. 3, 2018, pp. 380-407.
“Prototyping Personography for The Yellow Nineties Online: Queering and Querying History in the Digital Age.” Alison Hedley (lead author) and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, Debates in the Digital Humanities Series, University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pp. 157-72.
“Reconstruire les Réseaux Historiques de la Circulation des Imprimés à l’ère Numérique: The Yellow Nineties Online et les Périodiques Esthètes Fin-de-Siècles.” [Rebuilding Historical Networks of Print Circulation in the Digital Age: The Yellow Nineties Online and Fin-de-Siècle Aesthetic Periodicals], translated by Évanghélia Stead. Europe des revues II, edited by Hélène Védrine and Évanghélia Stead, Les Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne (PUPS), 2018, pp. 803-23.
“The Legacy of Oscar Wilde: Fairy Tales, Laurence Housman, and the Expression of ‘Beautiful Untrue Things.’” Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood, edited by Joseph Bristow, Routledge, 2017, pp. 89-118.
“Illustration.” Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Joanne Shattock, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 104-25.