About

Emily Allen completed her PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1996 and held an Isaac Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie University before joining Purdue University in 1997. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, with a particular focus on the Victorian novel, and is an affiliated faculty member in Purdue's programs for Comparative Literature and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Allen is the author of Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel and co-author of Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in September 2024. She is also one of the founders of NAVSA, the North American Victorian Studies Association. Her research interests include cultural studies, gender studies, narrative theory, and the history of the novel. In addition to her research, Professor Allen is actively involved in honors education, having served as the Director of the College of Liberal Arts Honors Program and as the inaugural Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the John Martinson Honors College. She is the founding director of the JMHC's Blue Sky Teaching and Learning Laboratory, focusing on inclusive and interdisciplinary pedagogy. Professor Allen mentors undergraduate researchers and has published an archival history of the John Martinson Honors College with honors students. In her teaching role within the English Department, she covers topics related to the novel and nineteenth-century literature, and her teaching has been recognized with several awards, including the Charles B. Murphy Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching. She is a member of Purdue's Teaching Academy and is listed in Purdue's Book of Great Teachers.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Art
• Literature
• Humanities
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Art history
• Philosophy
• Archaeology
• Visual arts
• History
• Engineering
• Media studies
• Aesthetics
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Sonic Celebration in Mobile, Alabama’s Port City Secondliners and the Jukebox Brass Band

  Journal of World Popular Music · 2025-06-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article contributes to the exploration of contemporary popular brass music, focusing on its manifestations in the context of Mobile, Alabama. Through ethnographic research and musical analysis, it examines the multifaceted dimensions of Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebrations, particularly emphasizing the role of brass bands in shaping the festivities. The study delves into the Port City Secondliners (PCS), a majority Black social club, and their efforts to counter the dominant traditions of white Mardi Gras organizations by establishing more intracommunal celebrations for Black Mobilians since 2009. More broadly, through the music of the Jukebox Brass Band, the PCS facilitate sonic celebration by fostering musical repertoires that reflect their values and tastes, emphasizing local places of significance, and propelling intergenerationally developed Carnival traditions. Here I define sonic celebration as musically- driven modes of joy that reflect community values and activity. These modes of celebration rely upon Black popular musics (e.g., hip- hop) and help popularize brass traditions in culturally significant ways.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring women’s views towards No-Lo alcohol products during pregnancy: a photo elicitation guided qualitative study

  Research Square · 2025-09-12 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Systematic identification and characterization of eukaryotic and viral 2A peptide-bond-skipping sequences

  Cell Reports · 2025-06-18 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  2A peptides are 18- to 22-amino-acid sequences that cause an unusual co-translational peptide-bond-skipping event. Initially discovered in viruses, they allow multiple proteins to be produced from a single open reading frame. Despite their utility, their evolutionary prevalence and sequence diversity remain unclear. Our computational analyses predict ∼2,200 2A peptides, significantly expanding the known class of 2A peptides (class A) and identifying a previously unrecognized class (class B). Predicted 2A peptides are widespread in RNA viruses and eukaryotes. Functional tests in human cells confirm skipping activity in most cases, suggesting that thousands of active 2A peptides exist. Mutational analysis reveals key residues near the skipped bond and within the upstream region; for instance, class B 2A peptides contain a conserved N-terminal tryptophan, whose register and identity are critical for activity. Together, our findings reveal that 2A peptides are more diverse and widespread than previously appreciated.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• EVENT West Lafayette

  Victoriographies · 2025-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper offers a place-based reflection on the West Lafayette hub of EVENT 2024, which took place at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. It explores how scale, modality, and locality shaped the conference experience. Though challenges in cross-hub connectivity and logistics emerged, EVENT 2024 succeeded in generating meaningful academic exchange and fostering professional community, underscoring the potential for smaller, locally rooted conferences to provide an enriching and impactful alternative or supplement to traditional large-scale meetings. By underscoring the tensions between the global and the local, the synchronous and the asynchronous, and the physical and the digital, this paper reflects upon what EVENT 2024 accomplished and what future iterations might improve. Ultimately, the success of such meaningful events emerges through the strength of pre-existing networks and the intentional curation of specific experiences. The West Lafayette hub thus offers insights into the evolving nature of academic gatherings in an era of sustainability, digital connectivity, and shifts in scholarly interaction.

  PublisherDOI

• Assembling the 1870s

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-01-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Robert Browning and the Virtuous Act

  2024-08-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In this chapter, we tease out the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh on Robert Browning’s approach to temporality. We argue that Browning abandons “realist time” in favor of a temporality that more closely resembles the future anterior we have been exploring in this book. We are not claiming that such a temporality is a taxonomic feature of the verse-novel—and, as we saw in Chapters Seven and Eight, it often is not—but we wish to illustrate that there was a formal alternative in the period, however strange such a temporal structure may appear to us following the hegemonic success of the novel and our tendency to adopt the novel’s form of temporality in understanding our own lives. We explore these issues in Ring and the Book by examining Browning’s approach to questions of truth (especially representation) and questions of virtue (especially virtuous acts).

  PublisherDOI

• Lord Byron and Genre

  2024-08-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Byron’s poetry, especially Don Juan, has had a vexed relationship with critical efforts to make sense of Romanticism and of the genres that make up this field of study. One clear reason for this poor canonical fit is because Wordsworth and Coleridge were so influential in disseminating the expressivist theory of kairotic lyric poetry that came to define not only Romanticism but also poetry itself. This chapter asks: Does the history of generic form—especially of the two generic dominants of twentieth-century criticism, the lyric and the novel—look different when Byron’s Don Juan is factored into the historical equation? We examine how Byron’s poetry works against the new formal principles of both narrative and lyric, and we illustrate the ways that he proposes a more radical approach to event and temporality that is inspired by the French Revolution and that resembles Alain Badiou’s concepts, event and future anterior.

  PublisherDOI

• Novel-Poetry

  2024-08-05 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Novel-Poetry examines the verse-novel, a hybrid genre that emerged in the middle decades of Britain’s nineteenth century, and makes a larger claim about both the nature of genre and formal structures for time, action, and identity that cross genres. The authors uncover trajectories of literary influence that have gone unseen because of how we have come to understand basic categories—such as lyric and narrative—that structure our approach to literature and affect how we shape our lives, lives which are often constrained by cause-and-effect, narrative-driven ways of approaching time and possibility. Novel-Poetry tracks an alternative way of thinking about time and event that was inspired by the French Revolution, popularized by Lord Byron, and explored by experimental Victorian poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. The authors turn to the work of philosophers Alain Badiou, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and Slavoj Žižek to theorize this alternative mode, which they align with the “futur antérieur.” The temporality of the future anterior disrupts both the novel’s realist chronologies and the expressivist lyric’s cult of “the moment,” thus liberating possibilities for collective action. Ranging widely across romantic lyric poetry, Victorian novels, and both nineteenth-century and contemporary literary theory, Novel-Poetry asks, what alternative structures and temporalities does a focus on either realistic narrative or the lyric moment occlude? Are there ways of thinking about lived experience and personal or collective agency that do not conform to traditional models, ways that the verse-novel might help us to explore? What might be gained today from trying to think about ourselves and our world outside of established frameworks that are now so naturalized as to feel almost inescapable?

  PublisherDOI

• List of Figures

  2024-08-05

  paratext1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Problem of Form

  2024-08-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter asks how we should understand the relation of “verse” and “novel” in the designation “verse-novel”? The question raises larger issues about what is knowable and what can be designated in a set—for example, the set that constitutes “verse,” which we have tended to understand as distinct from the set that constitutes “novel.” We turn to Alain Badiou, Paul Cohen, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wai Chee Dimock, and fractal geometry to offer a new theory of genre that we apply to the verse-novel in the chapters that follow. We distinguish this approach from other types of formalism, especially “strategic formalism,” which is proposed by Caroline Levine, and “surface reading,” which is theorized by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus. We finish by distinguishing our understanding of the verse-novel from past approaches to the genre.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dino Franco Felluga

  16 shared

• Sean Pryor

  UNSW Sydney

  2 shared

• Brennen Keen

  2 shared

• Tsitsi Jaji

  1 shared

• Shari Holland

  1 shared

• Rosemarie Smith

  Maine Medical Center

  1 shared

• Aisha Coulson-Walters

  1 shared

• D.S. Harper

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D. in Musicology

  Florida State University

  2021

• Master of Music in Historical Musicology

  Florida State University

  2016

• Bachelor of Music with Elective Studies in Outside Fields (Math)

  University of South Alabama

  2014

Awards & honors

• Charles B. Murphy Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teachi…
• College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher Aw…
• Teaching for Tomorrow Award