Miriam Wallace

Miriam L. Wallace is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Illinois-Springfield, and Professor of English. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and holds her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Literature. As a proud liberal arts graduate, she advocates for the value and impact of academic study, art making and performance, public presentations, and study abroad for all students—noting the impact of these experiences on increased self-confidence, intellectual curiosity, and personal and professional growth.

She has written extensively on British writers who used fiction as well as essay to advocate for political reform in the 1790s—most notably in Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel (2009) (which was supported by an NEH College Teacher Fellowship). More recent work explores Romantic-era public speaking as depicted in satirical prints, literature, and popular culture—particularly by those formerly excluded from rhetorical training by virtue of class, sex, gender, race, educational level, or disabilities. She was Principle Investigator for an NEH Humanities Connections Planning Grant to build a new “concentration” in Health, Culture and Societies from 2021-2022, for which she developed and co-taught an introduction to HCS with colleagues in Epidemiology, Anthropology, History, and Physiology/Medicine. She continues as co-editor of the “Transits: Literature, Thought, and Culture 1650-1850” series with Bucknell University Press with Dr. Mona Narain. Since January 2023 she has been involved in organizing and speaking about academic freedom and the importance of public universities as equity engines, resisting efforts to diminish or limit humanistic exploration and voices.