Robert O'Kell

While a graduate student at Indiana University, I served as Editorial Assistant and then Managing Editor of the journal, Victorian Studies, and subsequently had a centennial-year Victorian Studies Dissertation Fellowship at Keble College, Oxford. 

At the University of Manitoba (1970 to 2014) I taught upper-level, honours, and graduate courses in Victorian and Romantic literature, and some honours interdisciplinary courses in 19th-century thought as well. But I also happily taught the first-year, introductory course, Representative Literary Works, whenever possible. I always considered it important to find a balance between research and teaching, while at the same time doing more than the required minimum of service to the Department, Faculty, University, academic profession, and wider public community. This led to recognition and awards in all three areas -- including an Outstanding Teacher Award, and a Community Outreach Award.

My book, on the relation between Benjamin Disraeli’s published writings and his political career, was recognized with a UM-UMFA merit award for Outstanding Achievement in Research, and was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, and more than a dozen scholarly journals. It is still in print, and it and a number of my articles are still frequently cited by others working in the areas of my expertise. As part of my research supported by several SSHRC grants, I held Visiting Scholar appointments on sabbaticals at Queen's University, the University of Leicester, and Cornell University. From 1983-5 I served a term as President of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada. I also served on the University's Senate for 22 years, the Board of Governors for 4 years; and was Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1999 to 2004. Then, by Order in Council I was appointed to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (2005-10), representing Manitoba.
 

• PhD (English Literature), Indiana University, 1974
• Certificate, Victorian Studies, Indiana University, 1970
• MA (English Literature), Indiana University, 1968
• BA Honours (English Literature), Carleton University, 1964
• Dipl EET (Electronic Engineering Technology), Ryerson Institute of Technology, 1960

Research interests

• The rhetoric of Victorian politics
• 19th-century advertising
• Victorian literature (fiction, non-fiction prose, and poetry)
• 19th-century British social, political and Imperial history
• Victorian political cartoons

Research Summary

My current research on The Rhetoric of Victorian Politics is highly interdisciplinary. It draws on both theoretical concerns and empirical evidence from literature, history, and psychology. As a means of persuasion and as a clue to motivations, 19th-century political rhetoric necessarily involves some consideration of, not just speeches in Hansard, but also letters, newspapers, biographies, and autobiographies, as well as novels, poetry, and visual media such as advertising and political cartoons. And to understand rhetoric's efficacy, one must consider not only its utterance by the speaker, but but also its reception by its audience. The result should be a study that increases our understanding of how and why democracy evolved in 19th-century Britain, from something that was feared to something that was seen as essential to civilization's stability. This might well be relevant in the 21st century as we contemplate the possibility of the reverse.

• Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2013, pbk 2014.
• "Disraeli's 'Autobiography': Letters, Novels, Memoranda, Journalism, Biography, and Speeches," in Disraeli and the Politics of Fiction, eds. A. D. Cousins and Dani Napton, Brill, 2022, 7-33.
• "Past and Present: Young England and Industrial Mediaevalism," Victorian Review, (Spring 2016), 
• "Young England," BRANCH: British Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, edited by Dino Franco Felluga, Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web, 2016.
• "Benjamin Disraeli," Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, 4 vols., edited by Dino Felluga, Linda K. Hughes, and Pamela Gilbert, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Vol.1, 449-456. Print and Web.
• "Advertising," in The Grolier Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era, 4 vols., edited by James Eli Adams. Grolier Publishing, 2004, Vol. 1, 8-11.
• "Two Nations or One?: Disraeli's Allegorical Romance," Victorian Studies, 30: 2 (Winter 1987), 211-34. Rpt. Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 79. Gale 1999.
• "William Ewart Gladstone," Dictionary of Literary Biography: Victorian Prose Writers After 1867, Vol. 57, edited by William Thesing, 91-107. Bruccoli Clark Layman/Gale, 1987.
• "Disraeli's Coningsby. Political Manifesto or Psychological Romance?" Victorian Studies, 23: 1 (Fall 1979), 57-78. rpt. Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 79. Gale 1999.
• "The Autobiographical Nature of Disraeli's Early Fiction," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 31:3 (December, 1976), 253-84.