Faculty & Staff
Joel J. Brattin
Professor
Faculty Listing
Office: Salisbury Laboratories, 24
Phone: +1-508-831-5572
Fax: +1-508-831-5932
jjb@wpi.edu
Educational Background
- A.B., University of Michigan, 1978
- Ph.D, Stanford University, 1985
Research & Teaching Interests
19th-century British literature, especially Dickens; manuscripts; textual studies; textual editing
Research
The bulk of my scholarly work falls into three principal areas. I work on the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), on textual scholarship (especially textual editing and manuscript work), and on the American guitarist and composer Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970).
I have been studying (and enjoying) Charles Dickens's life and fiction for thirty years; Dickens was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University, and of my first book as well. I have published a range of articles and reviews treating Dickens in such journals as The Dickensian, Dickens Quarterly, and Dickens Studies Annual, and have contributed articles to the Oxford Companion to Dickens. I have served as trustee, secretary/treasurer, vice president, and president of the Dickens Society.
My textual scholarship has primarily focussed in two areas: textual editing and manuscript analysis. I have established the text of Dickens's last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, and helped to establish the text of key works by the most influential 19th-century writer of non-fiction prose, Thomas Carlyle, for the California Carlyle edition. I have worked with the literary manuscripts of many important writers, especially Dickens; close analysis of the complex tangle of interlineations and deletions in his manuscripts reveals a great deal about his artistic intentions and achievements.