Office: 319 EPB
Phone: 319-335-0434
E-Mail: Florence-Boos@uiowa.edu

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Florence Boos

Victorian Literature

Florence (Saunders) Boos, Professor of English, has taught Victorian poetry, non-fiction prose and cultural studies at Iowa since 1973. Her teaching and research-interests include poetry by women, Pre-Raphaelitism and other aspects of Victorian art, nineteenth-century social and intellectual history, and marxist and feminist approaches to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature.

She has published critical studies of the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, extensively annotated critical editions of Morris's Socialist Diary and Earthly Paradise, and more than a hundred journal articles, essays and reviews devoted (for the most part) to the topics mentioned above. She has also edited special collections for Victorian Poetry of articles on Morris and working-class poetics, and is currently at work on a book-length study of the poetry of working-class women in Victorian Scotland.

She is currently president of the William Morris Society in the United States, and co-editor of the Morris On-Line Edition, with Dr. Rosie Miles of the University of Wolverhampton. She also serves on the advisory boards of Victorian Poetry, Cahiers Victoriens and Edouardiens, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and the William Morris Society Journal.

Undergraduate courses she has taught have included a number in Victorian literature (Victorian Poetry, the Literature and Culture of Nineteenth Century Britain, The Literature and Culture of Scotland 1780-1930, Victorian Short Fiction, The Nineteenth Century Novel); several in African-American literature (African-American Poetry, Poetry and Memoirs by British and American Writers of African Descent, African-American Women Writers); and a few experimental courses in other areas (among them Nature and 'Green' Traditions in British and American Literature since 1800).

Graduate courses she has offered have included survey cycles in early and late-Victorian literature, and seminars on topics such as "Victorian and Edwardian Women Poets" and "Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes and Decadents." She has also participated in almost two hundred comprehensive examinations since the mid- 1970s, and directed more than fifty successful dissertations.

She has served on a number of university-wide committees which focused on problems of inclusion and student and faculty welfare, and has maintained ties with the Women's Studies Program, which she helped found. She has also participated in teaching-exchanges with the English departments of Háskola Íslands (the University of Iceland), Københavns Universitet (the University of Copenhagen), and the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier (the latter twice). She has, finally, traveled as often as possible to England and Scotland to do research, give talks, and visit friends, and to assorted other destinations in the company of Bill and/or Eugene (her husband and son).