Hannah LeClair’s research in British and French literature of the long nineteenth century focuses on realism's visual rhetorics. Her interests include poetry and poetics, aesthetics and visual culture, the nineteenth-century reception of romanticism, and twentieth-century theories of everyday life. She is writing a dissertation about landscape, setting, and the afterlife of picturesque aesthetics in the nineteenth-century realist novel.
At Penn, Hannah has taught or assisted undergraduate courses in the departments of English and History, and the Comparative Literature Program. She served as a coordinator for Theorizing, the Comparative Literature Program's colloquium series, and Intensive, a graduate-student reading group. Recently, she co-coordinated ResVic, Penn’s Restoration-Victorian Studies Graduate Working Group.
Hannah has presented her dissertation research both regionally and internationally at annual conferences of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (NCSA), and Northeast MLA (NeMLA), as well as the 25th International Thomas Hardy Society Conference & Festival in Dorchester, UK, and the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de théorie critique in Paris.
After obtaining her B.A. from Bard College, Hannah worked in secondary education for several years in Limousin, France and Burlington, Vermont. Her writing and book reviews appear in Jacket2, Music & Literature, and Asymptote.