Virginia L. Lewis

Virginia L. Lewis has held academic positions as a Germanist since 1988. She received her Ph.D. in Modern German Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. As a recipient of a DAAD Fellowship in 1987-88, Lewis researched the depiction of crimes against property in nineteenth-century German prose at the Universität Hamburg. The outcome of this work was her first book, Flames of Passion/Flames of Greed: Acts of Arson in German Prose Fiction 1850-1900, published in 1991.

Lewis has since published numerous articles on narrative in Germany and East Central Europe, including "Land, Self and Nation in Rebreanu's Ion" (2009), "Gottfried Keller's Critique of Enclosures in Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe" (2005) and "The Other Face of Modernization: The Collapse of Rural Society in East Central European Realism and Naturalism" (1995). In her book Globalizing the Peasant: Access to Land and the Possibility of Self-Realization (2007), Lewis develops and applies a definition of "Global Literature" that privileges the role of narrative as an expression of the impact of globalization in every society it has touched. Most recently, she has translated Móricz Zsigmond's first published novel Sárarany (1910) into English as Gold in the Mud.

Virginia L. Lewis is currently employed at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. She has authored a German-language novel Schön Kästnerisch verfahren. Her current research is focused on the interaction between the commodification of land and the pursuit of nationalist goals in European narrative from France's Zola to Bulgaria's Elin Pelin.