About

Professor Andrea K. Henderson is a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine, with a research focus centered on nineteenth-century British culture. Her scholarly interests include exploring formal similarities between literary arts, visual arts, and sciences, with a particular emphasis on how mathematical formalism influenced Victorian literature and visual art. Her recent work includes a book titled 'Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture,' which examines the intersection of mathematical ideas and Victorian artistic practices. Professor Henderson's research encompasses a wide range of topics within her specialization, including Victorian equations, representations of atomic individuals in nineteenth-century Britain, and the formalist realism in Victorian physics and photography. She has contributed to the understanding of Victorian aesthetics and science through numerous publications and has been recognized with several academic distinctions, such as being a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at Yonsei University in South Korea, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an ACLS Fellow. Her work is characterized by a detailed analysis of the formal and conceptual links between literature, visual arts, and scientific ideas during the Victorian era, making her a prominent figure in her field.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Psychiatry
• Anthropology
• Social psychology
• Geography
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Developing an Intergenerational Model of Structural Racism Exposure among Women in Black Families in South Carolina, 1989–2020

  Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities · 2026-04-14

  articleOpen access

  Structural racism is a key driver of health inequities among Black Americans, yet its measurement remains inconsistent. This study introduces a multigenerational model of exposure to structural racism across five domains—criminal justice, economic opportunity, educational resources, political participation, and residential segregation—among Black women in South Carolina from 1989 to 2020. It addresses key gaps by applying a lifecourse perspective, identifying consistent indicators over time and space, and using latent variables for assessment across two generations. We developed a multigenerational dataset by linking South Carolina birth certificates along the maternal line (1989–2020), focusing on first births among Black mothers with complete structural racism data (n = 75,088 births; 37,544 family trees). Twenty-two indicators were drawn from national and state sources, merged at the county level. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to construct latent variables representing structural racism. Measurement invariance testing assessed consistency across generations. The model showed good fit for four domains—criminal justice, economic opportunity, educational resources, and residential segregation. Political participation was excluded due to poor fit. Economic opportunity indicators were significant for mothers but not grandmothers, highlighting generational shifts in indicator relevance. Four key dimensions of structural racism were observed across two generations in Black families in South Carolina, though indicator relevance varied. These findings emphasize the importance of context-specific, temporally aware measures. Future research should link these models to health outcomes to deepen understanding of how structural racism shapes health over time.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• United States military working dogs from 2019 to 2021: analysis of causes of service discharge and decreased service life

  Frontiers in Veterinary Science · 2025-10-09 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Introduction Military working dogs (MWDs) are maintained by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) in effort to maintain readiness. MWDs provide valuable abilities which include explosive and drug detection capabilities as well as security support. However, acquiring, training, and maintaining MWDs requires significant investment of resources. Therefore, understanding the prominent causes of service discharge and associated causes and demographics associated with decreased service duration in the modern MWD population is crucial. Methods To meet this objective, an extensive review was conducted of service discharge records of MWDs who were discharged from service in fiscal years 2019 through 2021. The causes of service discharge were categorized and subcategorized by Army Veterinary Corps Officers with extensive MWD experience. Service life and operational service life were calculated using lifecycle dates. Chi-square analysis compared frequencies of categories and subcategories, and logistic regression analysis was conducted on occurrence of the five most prominent categories to identify associations with breed, size, subpopulation, goal at procurement, outcome of service discharge, and duration of service. Results The presented results include data on 1,230 MWDs who were discharged from service during the selection period. The five most prominent causes of service discharge were neuromusculoskeletal disease, training, fear-anxiety, neoplasia, and heat injury which accounted for discharge of 83.50% of the MWDs. Each of these prominent categories were significantly associated with at least one of the population characteristics analyzed and all of them were significantly associated with duration of service. ANOVA analysis comparing mean service life resulted in significant differences of mean overall service with main effects of breed ( p = 0.0252), outcome ( p = 0.0004), service discharge category ( p < 0.0001), and subpopulation ( p < 0.0001). Conclusion These findings can inform mitigation strategies to prevent early or preventable service discharge in the future.

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• Divine Purpose? Religion, Race, and Attitudes Toward Life Extension Technology

  Sociology of Religion · 2024-06-21

  article

  Abstract There is a growing sociological literature examining how religion shapes attitudes toward science and technology. However, sociologists have done little to explore how attitudes toward religion and science shape support for end-of-life and life extension technologies. Past research suggests that those most likely to be interested in life extension technologies are nonreligious and White. However, we draw on theories in sociology of religion to examine how race and religion might intersect to shape attitudes about life extension. We find that Black Americans are significantly more interested in life extension than White Americans, and while religiosity decreases interest in life extension among White Americans, religiosity increases interest for Black Americans. And we find that Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely than White Americans to cite other-oriented and religious reasons over self-oriented reasons for wanting to extend their lives, such as “divine purpose” and a desire to contribute more to society.

  PublisherDOI

• Review: <i>The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism</i>, by S. Pearl Brilmyer

  Nineteenth-Century Literature · 2024-02-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| March 01 2024 Review: The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism, by S. Pearl Brilmyer S. Pearl Brilmyer, The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 289. $105 cloth; $30 paper. Andrea Henderson Andrea Henderson University of California, Irvine Andrea Henderson is a Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her latest essay, "Victorian Equations," appeared in Critical Inquiry's winter 2024 issue. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) 78 (4): 327–331. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.78.4.327 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Andrea Henderson; Review: The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism, by S. Pearl Brilmyer. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2024; 78 (4): 327–331. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.78.4.327 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search In The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism, S. Pearl Brilmyer sets out to redefine realism by centering our attention on the handling of character in British novels from 1870 to 1920. As she compellingly demonstrates, these novels work according to a logic that is quite different from that of mid-century high-realist novels on the one hand and modernist novels on the other, and as a result its protocols and aims have remained largely invisible. Unfamiliar as it might be, however, this logic is internally coherent, consistently pursued, and in keeping with contemporary scientific paradigms. It reflects a fundamental shift in conceptions of personhood, for rather than presenting character in terms of interiority and development, later realists pursued a dynamic materialist account of character as plastic, impressible, spontaneous, impulsive, relational, and vital. Brilmyer's chapter on Eliot's Middlemarch establishes the central claims and methodological protocols... You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Generational and Sociodemographic Differences in the Impact of Educational Expectations on Bachelor’s Degree Completion: The Monitoring the Future Study

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Previous work has documented the rise of educational expectations amongst US adolescents and the change in its ability to predict future educational attainment. However, studies have yet to examine these longitudinal changes across generational birth cohorts defined by ever-shifting social norms, cultural contexts, and social policies. Using Monitoring the Future study panel data, we conducted cohort-stratified modified Poisson regression models to estimate the probability of bachelor's degree completion by educational expectations overall and by gender, race and ethnicity, and parental educational attainment. We found that despite high educational expectations, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and first-generation students had a low likelihood of bachelor's degree completion. These relationships persisted across generational cohorts. These findings suggest that social and economic resources remain salient factors that structure educational opportunities for students from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds and first-generation students.

  PublisherDOI

• The Intersections among Race, Religion, and Science in Explaining Mental Health Conditions

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2024 · 4 citations

  • Sociology
  • Social psychology
  • Psychology

  Racial minority groups in the United States often seek out religious support for mental health struggles. Yet past studies have often overlooked religion as a key explanatory factor shaping racial-ethnic differences in perceptions of mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. The authors examine whether views of the relationship between religion and science shape agreement with different explanations for mental health conditions. Drawing on a national probability survey collected in 2021 ( n = 3,390), the authors find that individuals who draw boundaries between religion and science had higher odds of rejecting biological and social explanations of mental health conditions, whereas individuals who see religion and science as collaborative had higher odds of affirming biological and social explanations. Belief that we trust science too much (and religion not enough) helped explain Black respondents’ support for religious explanations. The findings underscore the importance of beliefs about religion and science in understanding racial-ethnic differences in views of mental health.

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• A canine model to evaluate the effect of exercise intensity and duration on olfactory detection limits: the running nose

  Frontiers in Allergy · 2024-05-09 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Detection canines serve critical roles to support the military, homeland security and border protection. Some explosive detection tasks are physically demanding for dogs, and prior research suggests this can lead to a reduction in olfactory detection sensitivity. To further evaluate the effect of exercise intensity on olfactory sensitivity, we developed a novel olfactory paradigm that allowed us to measure olfactory detection thresholds while dogs exercised on a treadmill at two different exercise intensities. Dogs ( n = 3) showed a decrement in olfactory detection for 1-bromooctane at 10 −3 (v/v) dilutions and lower under greater exercise intensity. Dogs' hit rate for the lowest concentration dropped from 0.87 ± 0.04 when walking at low intensity to below 0.45 ± 0.06 when trotting at moderate intensity. This decline had an interaction with the duration of the session in moderate intensity exercise, whereby dogs performed near 100% detection in the first 10 min of the 8 km/h session, but showed 0% detection after 20 min. Hit rates for high odor concentrations (10 −2 ) were relatively stable at both low (1 ± 0.00) and moderate (0.91 ± 0.04) exercise intensities. The paradigm and apparatus developed here may be useful to help further understand causes of operationally relevant olfactory detection threshold decline in dogs.

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• Harriet Martineau’s Realized Abstractions

  Nineteenth-Century Literature · 2024-08-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Andrea Kelly Henderson, “Harriet Martineau’s Realized Abstractions” (pp. 81–105) Critics have long noted—and often lamented—the formal incoherence of Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34). This essay argues that the tales’ formal bifurcations can be understood not as a failing but as a conscious response to the absence of a contemporary consensus regarding the groundedness of economic abstractions. Martineau’s aesthetic of what I call “realized abstraction” offers a solution of sorts to this epistemological problem: unable to mediate between abstractions and particulars, she simply insists on the importance of both. Berkeley the Banker, her tale devoted to banking and currency, vividly dramatizes this dichotomizing logic. In this work, the relationship of concrete value to its abstract representation in paper money is analogized to a troubled marriage, one in which the husband forces his virtuous wife to subscribe to his false representations. Martineau’s story will explicitly argue for the usefulness of economic theory and paper money, but she resists the tendency of abstractions to render the concrete invisible in an act of metaphoric coverture; instead, she presents the abstract and the particular as autonomous realms. Martineau’s aesthetic of juxtaposition thus aspires to virtues quite different from those of Romantic organic wholeness or realist transparency: her tales aim not only to educate readers in abstract principles and historical particulars but also to train them to discriminate between the two. In subsequent decades, philosophers of science would formulate compelling new ways to bind abstractions to particulars, and the success of that project would mean that despite the Illustrations’s enormous popularity during the 1830s, they would seem to later generations to be marred by formal fragmentation.

  PublisherDOI

• Victorian Equations

  Critical Inquiry · 2023-11-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As familiar as the form of the mathematical equation is to us, the ostensibly simple act of equating unlike things was an achievement many centuries in the making, and one that would ultimately redefine European mathematical enquiry such that its bias toward geometry and the concrete would be displaced by a bias toward algebraic abstraction. The moment of that displacement was the nineteenth century, and its broader significance is on particularly striking display in the British context, where the implications of algebraic abstraction were the object of sustained enquiry among mathematicians, logicians, and economists. This article argues that the ascendance of the algebraic equation, and the transformation in the conception of number on which it was premised, were not simply the product of evolutionary pressures internal to mathematics; the Victorian embrace of algebra was also a response to the practical and cognitive demands of Victorian economic life, which was increasingly reliant on attenuated exchange relations and merely nominal forms of ownership. This was an economy organized around the global extension of trade and characterized by the exponential growth of financial intermediation, of what Walter Bagehot called “number abstracted from reference.” Victorian economic practices thus modeled an abstraction that helped to justify the abstractions of mathematics, and that mathematics in turn was used by economic theorists to argue for the necessity and objectivity of their models. This mutually sustaining dialogue is particularly visible in the writings of William Stanley Jevons, who applied the principles of algebra to philosophy and economic theory so as to reconceive the logic of cognitive and social life in terms of equations. This logic, for which he was merely a spokesman, continues to shape our faith in the special value of abstract, theoretical knowledge.

  PublisherDOI

• Interpersonal Discrimination and Relationship Quality among Married Mid-Life and Older Black Adults

  Journal of Family Issues · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  Theories of minority stress contagion suggest that the consequences of racial discrimination may extend beyond the individual to impact close others. We empirically test direct and spillover associations between racialized stress and marital support and strain among mid-life and older Black spouses. We use actor-partner interdependence models to analyze dyadic data from 280 different-sex, married Black couples from the 2014 and 2016 Health and Retirement Study who completed the psychosocial leave-behind module. We find significant actor effects for husbands’ racial discrimination on their own marital support and strain, while wives’ racial discrimination is positively associated with their own marital strain. We find no evidence of partner effects nor significant gender differences in the association between racial discrimination and marital quality. The findings highlight pathways by which racial discrimination affects the marriage quality of Black men and women in mid- to late-life.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Keith Hugill

  5 shared

• Stephen Bonner

  5 shared

• Christopher G. Ellison

  5 shared

• Philip Howard

  Wake Forest University

  5 shared

• James Hynes

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• Richard P. Tucker

  4 shared

• Daniel W. McShea

  4 shared

• Robert Cohen

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Pennsylvania

Awards & honors

• Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, Yonsei University, South Ko…
• Guggenheim Fellow, 2012-13
• ACLS Fellow, 2012-13
• Michigan Humanities Award, 1999
• Bredvold Prize, 1996