Rachel Haines

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. My primary research interests include American literature and culture post 1865, transatlantic modernism, gender and sexuality studies (especially queer theory), aesthetics, and literary critical methodology. My dissertation project, “Wanting to Write: Forms of Self-Reference in the Early Queer Novel,” examines how twentieth-century queer writers employed aesthetic strategies of self-reference as a means of attaining their queer subjectivities. Through focused readings of novels and autobiographical writings by Henry James, Dorothy Strachey, Patricia Highsmith, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood, my dissertation offers a new theory of self-referentiality that locates the sense that a text feels autobiographical in the peculiarities of its style. Parts of this work have appeared or are forthcoming at conferences such as MLA, the French Society for Modernist Studies, and British Women Writers.

Beyond my scholarly work, I am also a fact-checker for New Literary History. I was also a department-sponsored participant for the Institute of World Literature at Harvard in 2025. From 2023–2024, I served as president of the Graduate English Students Association (GESA).

Prior to UVa, I earned my BA in English from Connecticut College in 2020, where I wrote my honors thesis on desire between women in the works of Henry James. A version of my chapter on The Wings of the Dove was published in Henry James Review, where it also won the Leon Edel Prize.  

Peer-Reviewed Articles:
“Authoring ‘the real thing’: Influence, Impressibility, and The Wings of the Dove’s Queer Style.” The Henry James Review 44, no. 2 (2023): 115–132.