My work sits at the intersection of literary studies, aesthetic thought, and art history and interrogates the stakes of looking at and rendering difference in the nineteenth-century Anglophone world and beyond.
My first monograph, Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies shows how Victorian aesthetic and ethical ideas, particularly those of John Ruskin, treat encounters between disabled and non-disabled subjects in visual art and literature. In so doing, my book demonstrates how Victorian writers and artists anticipate the terms of contemporary queer/crip theory.
I am currently working on a new book. Pre-Raphaelite in Black is the first comprehensive study of the presence of Black subjects in Pre-Raphaelite painting and writing, with chapters on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Simeon Solomon, and others. It argues for the importance of the influence of Italian Renaissance painting—primarily Venetian—on Pre-Raphaelite conceptions and renderings of Black subjects.
I am also working on a collection of essays that bridge the scholarly and the personal titled, The Art of Holding and an irreverent art history podcast-in-process (stay tuned!).
Contact me at nprizel@gmail.com