Staff Profile

I joined Newcastle University as a Lecturer in Victorian Literature in 2018.

I am currently serving as the Degree Program Director for the MA in English Literature.

Ph.D. State University of New York at Buffalo, English Literature, July 2012. 

M.A. State University of New York at Buffalo, English Literature, May 2008. 

B.A. Texas Christian University, English Literature, June 2005. 

B.A. Texas Christian University, Philosophy, June 2005.

My first book, Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf, was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2020. It theorizes novelistic duration and the conventions of realism through an analysis of representations of old age and aging, especially through the way novelists plot the development of characters over time.

My second book, Aging Earth: Senescent Environmentalism for Dystopian Futures, was published as part of the Cambridge Elements series in the Environmental Humanities in July 2023. This book challenges the privilege of youth in ecocritical thought and practice, especially the heteronormative urgency to address climate change for the sake of children and future generations. I propose a senescent environmentalism as a way of attending to the contingency of non-linear and non-teleological futures: drawing together the delicacy of ecosystems on the brink with the structural precarity of older people, queers, and people of color.

I am currently working on a third book, The Aging of Empire: Networks of Dependence from Young England to Young India, which focuses on how British and Indian authors mapped a politics of age onto the asymmetrical relation between colonizer and colonized. This project demonstrates how progressive, linear models of imperial expansion derived their power from a tacit comparison to the development of a human life, entangling anxieties about the durability of empire with figures relating to old age and youthful inheritance.

I welcome applications from prospective doctoral students working in the following fields:

*19th - Early-20th Century British and Indian Literature

*Age Studies

*Ecocriticism

*Postcolonial Literature and Theory

*Philosophy of Time

Undergraduate and Postgraduate Teaching 2023-24

Semester One:

SEL 2204: Victorian Passions, Victorian Values

SEL 8674: Research Methods I

Semester Two:

SEL 3395: The Victorian Novel: Time, Change, and the Life Course 

• Articles

  • Jewusiak J. Queer Futures for an Aging Planet. Poetics Today 2023, 44(1-2), 157–179.
  • Jewusiak J. Introduction: Forms of Aging. Poetics Today 2023, 44(1-2), 1-14.
  • Jewusiak J. Tennyson's Wrinkled Feet: Ageing and the Poetics of Decay. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 2021, 32.
  • Jewusiak J. Thomas Hardy’s Impulse: Context and the Counterfactual Imagination. Textual Practice 2020, 34(3), 461-478.
  • Jewusiak J. Retirement in Utopia: William Morris’s Senescent Socialism. ELH 2019, 86(1), 245-266.
  • Jewusiak J. Temporality. Victorian Literature and Culture 2018, 46(3-4), 909-913.
  • Jewusiak J. Suspenseful Speculation and the Pleasure of Waiting in Little Dorrit. Victorian Literature and Culture 2016, 44(2), 279-296.
  • Jewusiak J. Large-Scale Sympathy and Simultaneity in George Eliot’s Romola. Studies in English Literature 2014, 54(4), 853-874.
  • Jewusiak J. No Plots for Old Men. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 2013, 46(2), 193-213.
  • Jewusiak J. The End of the Novel: Gender and Temporality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 2011, 7(3), n. pag.

• Authored Books

  • Jewusiak J. Aging Earth: Senescent Environmentalism for Dystopian Futures. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
  • Jewusiak J. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

• Book Chapters

  • Jewusiak J. Aging and the Drain of Empire: Postcolonial Age Studies. In: Lipscomb, V; Swinnen, A, ed. The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging. London: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2024, pp.551-566.
  • Jewusiak J. Grandpaternalism: Kipling's Imperial Care Narrative. In: Barry E; Skagen MV, ed. Literature and Ageing. Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2020, pp.87-104.