Biography
Kristin Mahoney’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, gender and sexuality, and transnational and transcultural anticolonial coalitions. Her first book, Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge University Press, 2015), focused on the manner in which authors and artists associated with late-Victorian Decadence in England, Italy, Ireland, and South Africa engaged with the World Wars, the rise of the Labour Party, Irish nationalism, and new sexological categories in the early-twentieth century, foregrounding the extent to which figures we tend to think of as Victorian continued to play a prominent role in the political and cultural life of the modernist period. Her second book, Queer Kinship after Wilde (Cambridge University Press, 2022) continued the work she began in her first book, troubling conventional boundaries of periodization, by considering the persistent influence of Oscar Wilde and the Decadent Movement’s radical thinking concerning the concept of kinship from the fin de siècle into the modernist moment. Drawing on letters, diaries, photo albums, and unpublished manuscript material as well as fiction, poetry, and life writing, this project brings to light networks of and experiments in affiliation that indicate how Victorian Decadence’s ideas about the family were revised, reformulated, and inflected with a cosmopolitan sensibility by a network of bohemian figures who looked back to Wilde and forward to new ways of practicing connection in the early twentieth century. This book received Honorable Mention for the North American Victorian Studies Association Book Prize. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Criticism. She is also the founder and editor, along with Kate Hext and Alex Murray, of Cusp: Late 19th-/20th-Century Cultures (Johns Hopkins University Press), which received the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Prize for Best New Journal. She edited, along with Dustin Friedman, Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s (Cambridge University Press). She is currently working on a project entitled Love’s Cross Currents: Indo-Irish Affinities, 1880-1930, which focuses on the trouble caused by the concept of love within anticolonial coalitions formed between Irish and Indian subjects during the long turn of the century. Before joining the Department of English at MSU, she taught at Western Washington University.
Ph.D., English, University of Notre Dame, 2004
M.A., English, University of Notre Dame, 2001
B.A., Literature, New College of Florida, 1998
Works
“Oscar Wilde, Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen, and Cross-Channel Decadence in the Twentieth Century.” Oscar Wilde’s Paris, Paris’s Oscar Wilde: City, Modernity, and Myth. Ed. Colette Colligan and Gregory Mackie. University of Toronto Press, 2026.
“Primitive Marriage in Modern Times.” (edited cluster) Victorian Literature and Culture 53.2 (2025).
“Michael Field and Post-Victorian Decadence.” Michael Field in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
“Oscar Wilde, Camp Racism, and Antiracist Camp.” The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Kate Hext and Alex Murray. Oxford University Press, 2025.
With Dustin Friedman. Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
“The Boom in Yellow: The Afterlife of the 1890s.” Extraordinary Aesthetes. Ed. Joseph Bristow. University of Toronto Press, 2023.
Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
“The Decadent Novel.” The Oxford Handbook of Decadence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
“Taking Wilde to Sri Lanka & Beardsley to Harlem: Decadent Practice, Race, and Orientalism.” Victorian Literature and Culture 49.4 (2021): 583-606.
“Nancy Cunard and the Afterlives of Decadent Desire.” Feminist Modernist Studies 4.2 (2021): 222-34.
“The Decadent Novel.” The Oxford Handbook of Decadence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
“Camp Modernism and Decadence.” A History of Literary Decadence. Ed. AlexmMurray. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
“Feeling Like an Outsider: Harold Acton, Anna May Wong, and Decadent Cosmopolitanism in China.” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 3.1 (2020): 119-23.
“Dainty Malice: Ada Leverson, Post-Victorian Decadence, and Feminist Dandyism.” Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Ed. Alex Murray and Kate Hext. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
“Michael Field’s Eric Gill: Radical Kinship, Cosmopolitanism, and Queer Catholicism.” Michael Field, Decadent Moderns. Ed. Ana Vadillo and Sarah Parker. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019.
“Decadence.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3/4 (2018): 636-40.
“An Extraordinary Marriage: The Mackenzies, Post-Victorian Decadence, and the Queer Cosmopolitanism of Capri.” Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism 3 (2018): 113-131.
“On the Ceylon National Review, 1906-11.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History (2018).
“Ethics and Empathy in the Literary Criticism of Vernon Lee.” Nineteenth-Century Prose 43.1-2 (2016): 193-210.
“Camp Aesthetics and Inequality: Baron Corvo’s Toto Stories.” Economies of Desire in the Long Nineteenth Century: Libidinal Lives. Ed. Jane Ford and Kim Edwards Keates. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
“The Transition to Modernism: Recent Scholarship on the Victorian/Modern Divide.” Literature Compass 10.9 (2013): (716-24).
“Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Collecting in The Connoisseur, An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors.” Victorian Periodicals Review 45.2 (2012): 175-99.
“Work, Lack, and Longing: D.G. Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and the Working Men’s College.” Victorian Studies 52.2 (2010): 219-248.
“Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 48.1 (2006): 39-67.
Gallery
College of Arts & Letters News
- Journal, Co-Created by English Professor, Receives Prestigious AwardCollege of Arts & Letters
January 24, 2024An academic journal co-created by Kristin Mahoney, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, has received the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Best New Journal Award. This prestigious award was presented on Jan. 5 at the 2024 […] Read Now →
- College Celebrates Accomplishments of 2023 Promoted FacultyCollege of Arts & Letters
September 20, 2023This year, 20 faculty members within the College of Arts & Letters have received promotions. The success of these individuals was celebrated during the 2023 Faculty and Staff Welcome Reception on Sept. 18 at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center. The College has […] Read Now →
- On the Cusp: English Professor Establishes New JournalCollege of Arts & Letters
January 25, 2023Kristin Mahoney, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, has helped create a new journal that focuses on field-defining scholarship on the works, authors, artists, problems, and phenomena that defined the dynamic period from the late […] Read Now →
- Steffke Receives Prize Awarded to Most Outstanding Graduating SeniorCollege of Arts & Letters
April 16, 2020Emily Steffke, a graduating senior earning a B.S. in Neuroscience and a B.A. in English, has been named the 2020 recipient of the Richard Lee Featherstone Endowed Prize. The prize is given to the most outstanding MSU graduating senior as determined by the Featherstone […] Read Now →
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