Liora Selinger is a PhD candidate in the department of English. Her research focuses on representations of student-centered learning in British Romantic-era literature in which child characters and child readers are invited to participate in developing knowledge rather than required to passively receive adults’ explanations. In the poetry, prose, and pedagogic writing of Isaac Watts, Anna Barbauld, Mary Lamb, William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, and Lewis Carroll, her dissertation, Romanticism, Childhood, and the Poetics of Explanation, reveals an early literary history of progressive education in which adults and children share conversations of collaborative discovery that value and respond to the child’s initiative and curiosity. 

Liora is the recipient of the 2021 Princeton University Graduate School Quin Morton Teaching Award and the 2019 McCosh Teaching Award. As a Quin Morton Teaching Fellow, she designed and taught a course on Curiosity in Princeton’s Writing Program. She has taught in the Children’s Literature course and the Nineteenth-Century Fiction course in Princeton’s English Department. Along with Professor Bill Gleason, she developed a digital humanities curriculum for the use of Princeton’s digital ABC Books archive in the ENG 385: Children’s Literature course. She also teaches courses on Memory and Autobiography and, as part of Princeton’s Freshman Scholars Institute, she has taught “Ways of Knowing.” Prior to joining Princeton’s English department, Liora taught Kindergarten in New York City.

As a Bain-Swiggett Assistant in Research, Liora is developing a collection of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century texts for children and “use in schools” in the Princeton Prosody Archive. Liora’s research has also been supported by Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion. She has coordinated the English Department’s Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies Colloquium and Contemporary Poetry Colloquium and is an active participant in Princeton’s Historical Poetics Reading Group.