Dahlia Porter received her BA from New York University and her MA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Her dissertation, 'Knowledge Broken': Empiricist Method and the Forms of Romanticism, illustrates how authors at the turn of the century evolved new formal techniques in response to the expanding cultural authority of scientific method.

Her scholarly interests also include museums and botanical gardens, women's writing about science, science fiction, children's literature, and book publishing and advertising. Dahlia is the co-editor, with Michael Gamer, of the forthcoming Broadview edition of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.

She teaches courses in Romanticism, Eighteenth-century British literature, poetry from the Restoration to the 20th century, and the novel; she has offered seminars on the confession, travel literature, and contemporary American culture. In 2006, Dahlia won a Dean's award for Distinguished Teaching.