Matthew Connolly completed his PhD in English at The Ohio State University in 2018. His dissertation, “Reading as Forgetting: Sympathetic Transport and the Victorian Literary Marketplace,” won Ohio State’s 2019 Muste Award for the best dissertation in English. Matthew’s research concerns Victorian understandings of fiction reading as a form of imaginative transport; his essays take up writings from novelists, poets, and critics who compared the experience of reading literature to physical manifestations of movement taking place outside of the text, such as the railroad and the steamship that sustained Britain’s global empire in the nineteenth century. 

Matthew is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Belgravia

Household Words, “Conducted by Charles Dickens”

Cover of the 1000th number of Blackwood’s Magazine (Feb 1899)

Screen Shot 2016-05-21 at 2.55.31 PM

Wrapper of the sixth installment of Dombey and Son (March 1847)