James Diedrick

James Diedrick read Charles Dickens's 1853 masterpiece Bleak House as a junior in college, thus beginning a life-long interest in all things Victorian. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Washington, publishing his first article (on Bleak House, naturally) in 1978 (http://bit.ly/2iIDrOb). After graduating in 1979, he taught at Chapman University in California, Albion College in Michigan, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. He is now Professor of English at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

Seeing connections between the urban satires of contemporary novelist Martin Amis and Dickens, Diedrick published Understanding Martin Amis in 1995 (second, expanded edition in 2004). In 2006 he co-edited Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History (another Victorian connection; Kubrick adapted the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray's Barry Lyndon).

In 2016 Diedrick published a biography of the late-Victorian woman of letters Mathilde Blind.

Many of his shorter publications can be found here: https://agnesscott.academia.edu/JamesDiedrick.