Emily Steinlight is Associate Professor of English and also serves on the faculty of the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on the relationship between political thought and literary form, as well as histories and theories of the novel, mass politics, labor, nineteenth-century natural and social sciences, and critical theory. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University, where she held a Graduate Fellowship at the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the Roland G. D. Richardson Fellowship in the Department of English. Prior to joining the Penn faculty, she taught at Trinity University and, before that, at the University of Chicago, where she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities.

She is the author of Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Cornell University Press, 2018), which won the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian studies. Her current book project, "Unmanageable Thoughts," examines nineteenth-century theories of mental labor. Steinlight’s essays appear in such journals as ELH, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Narrative, and she currently serves on the board of the Society for Novel Studies.