Project Information

Welcome to the George Eliot Archive, a digital repository of research resources for those studying the enormously successful and enduringly beloved Victorian woman writer, George Eliot. 

Here you will discover thousands of public domain images and documents pertaining to the life and works of George Eliot. We curate and provide editorial apparatus for understanding their original purposes and sources. An important and growing section of our website features open-access, born-digital projects with interactive data visualizations, which offer new ways of discovering information about George Eliot.

The George Eliot Archive project was launched in December 2018, on the eve of Eliot’s bicentenary, after two years of preparation. For more on our project's development, please refer to the Project History tab. 

The project would be inconsequential without two groups of contributors: the expert advisory editors (my generous colleagues in the field) who guide and encourage us; and the dedicated graduate and undergraduate research assistants who are constantly adding to the content and improving the functionality of our websites. For a list of these essential collaborators, please refer to the Project Staff tab.

For well over a decade, my scholarship has focused on George Eliot. I think of the George Eliot projects as the culmination of all my previous work and teaching in the fields of literature, biography, publishing, and digital humanities.

From 2013-2021, I was a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), an early leader in digital humanities. I am grateful for department, college, and institutional grants that funded student research assistants, and for the mentorship of my generous colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Undergraduate Research, the English department, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.

In the fall of 2021, I joined the faculty of Auburn University (AU) in Alabama. With the AU Libraries' supportive administration, especially Greg Schmidt and Shali Zhang, a talented web developer Brad Hughes, and a dedicated interdisciplinary team of undergraduate and graduate students, the George Eliot Archive and its sister projects continue to grow and improve. The sister sites are:

1. George Eliot Review Online (in partnership with the George Eliot Fellowship), the digitized version of this important peer-reviewed journal from 1970 to the present issue; and

2. George Eliot Scholars digital commons, where we are collecting open-access journal articles and providing a digital commons forum where current scholars may contribute their own works on George Eliot, including articles, blogs, syllabi, conference papers, videos, adaptations, and more.

These three related, ever-expanding digital projects, along with a new digital archive called Alabama Authors of the 19th and 20th Centuries, would not have been possible without the talented students I am blessed to work with semester by semester, year by year. To everyone who has helped build this project over the years, and to all the researchers who are using it, thank you. I love this work and am sincerely grateful for your support.

All my best,

Bev

(aka “Dr. Bev”)