obert O’Kell is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Manitoba, where he also served for 22 years on the University Senate and for two terms as an elected faculty member of the University’s Board of Governors.
While he was a graduate student at Indiana University, he served as Editorial Assistant and then Managing Editor of Victorian Studies, and subsequently had a Victorian Studies Dissertation Fellowship at Keble College, Oxford.
At the University of Manitoba (1970-2014) he taught upper-level, honours, and graduate courses in both Victorian and Romantic literature, and some honours interdisciplinary courses as well. And whenever possible, as a pleasure and a duty, he also taught the first-year, introductory course, Representative Literary Works. On sabbaticals he has had Visiting Scholar appointments at Queen’s University, University of Leicester, and Cornell University.
He was a founding member of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada and has served a term as its President. He has also served on the Council and the Executive of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and is currently a member of their Publications Committee of the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, which is supported by funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
His book, Disraeli and the Romance of Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2013; pbk. 2014) was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and more than a dozen scholarly journals. His articles have been published in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Victorian Studies, the Victorian Review, BRANCH, the Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, the Grolier Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era, Physics in Canada, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Open Letters Monthly, and Queen’s Quarterly. Recent pieces have appeared in Cahiers victorien et édourdien (101 (Spring 2025), and in a volume of essays, Disraeli and the Politics of Fiction, eds. A. D. Cousins and Dani Napton (Brill, 2022). Two related articles on the Royal Titles Bill (1876) are forthcoming in 2026 issues of Parliamentary History.
His current research, on the rhetoric of Victorian politics, involves a comparison of the language of parliamentary debates, political fictions, and newspapers, over the period from 1830 to the late 1880s. Victorian poetry remains a cherished avocation.
Created 24 November 2025
Last modified 3 December 2025