{"id":6380,"date":"2018-08-29T11:42:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-29T15:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/?post_type=profile&p=6380"},"modified":"2025-12-18T16:15:57","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T21:15:57","slug":"anna-henchman","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/profile\/anna-henchman\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Henchman"},"content":{"rendered":"

For CV click here<\/a><\/p>\n

I focus on nineteenth-century literature, especially the novel, poetry, and writings about the mind from a range of genres. All of my work asks how literature either represents or challenges the constraints of everyday perception. \u00a0My first book, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature<\/em>, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. \u00a0The Starry Sky Within <\/em>connected literary experiments in point of view with nineteenth-century astronomy. Victorian astronomy depicted a complex universe in constant motion, with no point of rest. The writers I treated set radically different perceptions of a single thing (a person, a planet, an event) next to each other by moving the reader through space at great speeds. I focused on four writers who were fascinated by astronomy: Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Thomas De Quincey, and Alfred Tennyson. Astronomers and novelists were equally obsessed with the problem of where we view things from. How, they wondered, can we picture the universe as a whole while being stuck on the surface of the earth?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m drawn to huge things and tiny things. My second book project, Tiny Creatures and the Boundaries of Being in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination<\/em><\/span>,<\/span> explores how literary and scientific writers imagined the inner lives of tiny creatures (such as ants, snails, and worms). Tiny Creatures<\/em> zeroes in on moments when writers contemplate the world as it is encountered by beings radically different from ourselves. When we imagine the sensory experience of a worm, a snail, or a fictional two-dimensional being, the assumptions we make from a human-centered system break down\u2014and the imagination opens up. In the second half of the nineteenth century many writers were preoccupied with the mystery of how matter (a human baby, an egg, the tip of a vine) could lose and acquire sentience.<\/p>\n

I am deeply committed to bridging boundaries between academic disciplines. To that end, the courses I teach draw from literature, history of science, and philosophy. These include an interdisciplinary course for honors college sophomores on \u201cClimate Change,\u201d \u201cChildren\u2019s Literature: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Imaginary Spaces<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe Boundaries of Life,\u201d \u201cInnovation, Culture, and Society,\u201d \u201cTime, Literature, and Narrative 1800-1930,\u201d and \u201cAnimals and Literature 1800-2000.\u201d Before coming to BU, I spent three years at Harvard\u2019s Society of Fellows. I organize an annual panel on new work in Victorian Studies, and co-organized a conference on Creativity Across the Disciplines at the Radcliffe Institute.<\/p>\n

Selected Publications <\/strong><\/p>\n

Books<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n