Robyn Warhol

Robyn Warhol is Vice Chair of the Department of English and Director of Project Narrative. After 26 years on the faculty at the University of Vermont, she joined Ohio State's English faculty as a core member of Project Narrative in 2009.  As a feminist narratologist, Warhol studies the interrelations between gender and narrative forms.  Among other publications, Warhol has written Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Popular Forms (Ohio State UP, 2003), a study of the ways sentimental, romantic, and serial texts work to establish and reinforce gendered performance in fans of TV, Hollywood film, and fiction.  That project focuses particularly on daytime soap operas and “tear-jerker” movies aimed at feminine audiences.  More recently she has been working on “reality effects” in mockumentaries like NBC’s The Office and in so-called reality-TV shows such as The Real Housewives series.  She is also studying techniques of direct address (the topic of her first book, Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel, 1989) in graphic memoirs by women cartoonists, including Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry.