Muriel Bernardi, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English and a Core Fellow at the University of St. Thomas, where she specializes in 18th- and 19th-century British literature and science. Before joining the faculty at UST, she taught in the English department at the University of Houston. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 2017 and received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024. Her research focuses on the rise of the physical and social scientific sciences over the course of the long nineteenth century and the literary experimentation that the novelists of this era performed to describe the disintegrating effects of a world transformed by modern materialist worldviews.

Her research focuses on scientists such as Charles Lyell, Emile Durkheim, Charles Darwin, and G.H. Lewes and novelists such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot. An essay on George Eliot’s novels and social scientific writing is set to be published next year in the Routledge Companion to George Eliot.