Biography

(he / him / his)

Current Interests

Standardization & infrastructure; History, form, and sociology of the novel; Narrative and temporality; Nineteenth-century British literature; Transgender literary history.

Information

Standardization (Standardisation): A Literary History approaches the topic by exploring how institutions create standards and then probes how through fiction people reimagined their subjectivity in relation to identical, interchangeable manufactured objects. Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel analyzes the nineteenth-century rise of public transport, the standardization of time and space, and the novel. The Art of Alibi shows the entanglement of the novel and the law courts as spaces of narrative in the nineteenth century. Grossman is currently at work on transgender theory and nineteenth-century fiction. A long term interest in the relation of community to systems and networks lies behind all these projects. Grossman received the UCLA Eby Senate Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014.

CV

Nineteenth-Century Literature (journal)

19th-Century Group

Dickens Universe

A Few Research Links

Education

• Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1996
• B.A. Brown University, 1989

Publications

Selected Works

Standardization (Standardisation): A Literary History (Chicago, 2026)
Amazon; Chicago

Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford, 2012)
Amazon US or UK; Oxford

The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Johns Hopkins, 2002)
Amazon; Hopkins