Amy Murray Twyning

Amy Murray Twyning earned her doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation, “Detective Narrative and the Problem of Origins in Nineteenth-Century England,” examines early examples of the detective genre in the context of social and legal change in the Victorian era. She is a scholar of Victorian literature and culture and lectures on the convergence of discourses of social class, evolution and natural science, and animal domestication where they define “the human” and “civilization.” She also has secondary focuses on Critical Race Theory and Posthumanist Theory.

Twyning serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Literature program and is its Undergraduate Research Coordinator. She also works with undergraduates to organize the annual Undergraduate Literature Conference.

Twyning’s teaching was recognized with a Tina and David Bellet Award for Teaching Excellence in 2017. She teaches Humans, Animals, Machines in Victorian Literature, 19th-century British Literature, Austen and Brontë, Literary Field Studies, and Imagining Social Justice.