Grace Franklin

Grace Franklin is a Mellon Humanities in a Digital World PhD Fellow (2022-24) and Provost Fellow. Her dissertation-in-progress won the Walter L. Arnstein Prize for best dissertation research in British Victorian Studies. “Power Play: Gas Infrastructure in Literature and Culture” explores unprecedented relationships to power initiated by the first widely-used fossil fuel utility, which supplied coal-gas light and heat. Through digital mapping, archival research, and literary analysis, it brings the history of our entanglements with fossil fuel into sharper focus, accentuating forgotten aspects of extraction-based life and elucidating ways in which coal continues to figure in our imaginations (through the metaphor of psychosocial gaslighting, for example). 

In 2020, Grace co-organized the GREEN Conference, a national, carbon-neutral event, and coedited a corresponding issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts, with Devin Griffiths and Brianna Beehler. She serves as Assistant Editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. Grace received her M.A. in English from UVA, where she collaborated on Collective Biographies of Women, an NEH-funded digital humanities database, and she has worked in marketing, arts & culture reporting, and instructional design.

• MA , Univ Virginia, 5/2015
• BA , University Of Georgia, 5/2012