Professor McKelvy studies and teaches British literature of the long nineteenth century with particular interests in the fields of Literature and Religion, the History of Reading, and Literature and the Arts.
William R. McKelvy's essays and reviews have appeared in English Literary History, Essays in Criticism, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, the Journal of British Studies, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Style, Victorian Institutes Journal, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, and the Yearbook of English Studies. His award-winning, revisionary literary history The English Cult of Literature: devoted readers, 1774-1880 (2007) is widely recognized as an important contribution to an early stage of the current religious turn in nineteenth-century British cultural studies. Recent works in this scholarly field include “The Importance of Being Ezra: Canons and Conversions in The Moonstone” in ELH (2019) and the chapter “Empire, Race, and Nation” in The Cambridge Companion to Religion in Victorian Literary Culture (forthcoming, 2024). McKelvy is currently completing a monograph entitled Portraits of the Artist in the Age of Steam. Earlier publications drawn from that research include “Iconic Destiny and ‘The Lady of Shalott’: Living in a World of Images” and “The Woman in White and Graphic Sex” in Victorian Literature and Culture (2007).
Since 2013, McKelvy has been Associate Editor of the Victorian Literature and Culture Series published by the University of Virginia Press, and in 2020 he started serving as Associate Editor of the widely subscribed Oxford Bibliographies: Victorian Literature.
