Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
she/her
Office Information:
3127 Angell Hall
hours: on leave 2022-23
(please email for appointment)
Womens Literature; Graduate Faculty; Nineteenth Century British; Comparative Literature; English; Theory; Romanticism American and British; Gender and Sexuality; Poetry and Poetics; British; Transatlantic
Education/Degree:
Princeton University (Ph.D in Comparative Literature, 1991); University of Amsterdam (Translation Studies, 1983-84); Cambridge University (B.A./M.A. in English Literature, 1983); Swarthmore College (B.A. in Ancient Greek, 1981)Current Courses
COMPLIT 780-001
Seminar in Translation
ENGLISH 635-001
Topics in Poetry
Highlighted Work and Publications

The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology
Yopie Prins (Editor) and Virginia Jackson (Editor)
The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry.
Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical...
See MoreLadies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy
Yopie Prins
In Ladies' Greek, Yopie Prins illuminates a culture of female classical literacy that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the formation of women's colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. Why did Victorian women of letters desire to learn ancient Greek, a "dead" language written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they wrote "some Greek upon the margin―lady's Greek, without the accents." Yet in the margins of classical scholarship they discovered other ways of knowing, and not knowing,...
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