Claudia L. Johnson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1994 and was Chair of the English Department from 2004-2012.  She specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel.  In addition to eighteenth-century courses, she teaches courses on gothic fiction, sentimentality and melodrama, the history of prose style, film adaptations of novels into film, detective fiction, Samuel Johnson, and, of course, Jane Austen.  In addition, she has strong research interests in eighteenth-century music and culture, in the idea of voice, in letterpress printing, in Yiddish story, in the American Songbook of the 1930’s and 1940s, and in international modernism.

Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago, 2012) won the Christian Gauss Award in 2013.  More recently she has published a deluxe edition of Jane Austen’s The Beautifull Cassandra (Princeton, 2018) in collaboration with artist Leon Steinmetz, and 30 Great Myths about Jane Austen (Blackwell, 2020) in collaboration with Clara Tuite. Her other books include The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen, ed. with Clara Tuite (Blackwell, 2005), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002), Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995), which won an Honorable Mention for the MLA Lowell Prize, and Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, 1988).  In addition she is keenly interested in textual scholarship, and has prepared editions of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and (with Susan Wolfson) Pride and Prejudice. Her research has been supported by major fellowships such as the NEH and the Guggenheim.

At present Johnson is working on the Regency diarist Anne Lister and on women and the invention of international modernism.