Dehn Gilmore is Professor of English at Caltech. Her research centers around the relationship between Victorian literature and culture. Her first book, “The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display” (Cambridge, 2013), argues for the crucial importance of visual culture as a force shaping the formal development and reading history of the Victorian novel. Authors like Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy are shown to have borrowed language and conceptual formations from art-world spaces—the art market, museums, large-scale exhibitions, and critical discourse—not only when they chose certain subjects or refined certain aspects of realism but also then they tried to adapt various genres of the novel for a new and newly vociferous mass audience. Gilmore’s current book project, “ ‘Large as Life’: The Victorians’ Disproportionate Reality,” examines the Victorian obsession with “life-sized” representation and how this obsession both shaped and was shaped by Victorian ideas of political representation, scientific research, artistic depiction, and novelistic realism.