General Introduction

The Brontëgram assignment begins with a simple question. What would the characters from nineteenth-century novels say and do if they were on social media today?

Established in 2025, Brontëgram is a digital pedagogy website for undergraduate students and instructors. It shares teaching resources and student work from a class assignment in the global nineteenth-century literature undergraduate seminar I teach for the Department of English at the University of Iowa.

The assignment invites students to analyze the novels we read in class alongside relevant scholarship and journalism about those novels to create social media profiles for the characters of their choosing. In the course, we typically read a novel written by Charlotte, Emily, or Ann Brontë—three British sisters in the nineteenth century whose books have become what the elite western Anglophone spheres today consider as “canonical” in English literature. In Fall 2025, we read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In Fall 2026, we will read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).

This short introductory essay, addressed to instructors as well as students and members of the public briefly sketches the broad teaching approach underpinning Brontëgram. I expect this essay to exist as a living document, updated each year based on that year’s iteration of the course, the student feedback collected from previous years, and developments in social media, technology, and pop culture. (This website also offers a short introductory essay for each novel that the course examines—these essays are more granular, focusing on specific learning goals and the assignments' scaffolding.)

Pedagogical Contexts and Frameworks

There are three general frameworks informing Brontëgram.

1. The Past Is Not Past

Like other educators of global nineteenth-century literature and culture, I often find myself emphasizing to my students how the artistic, cultural, social, and political debates in our century have their roots in the century that we are studying—a century that was shaped by enslavement and imperialism as well as anti-colonial revolution. The idea that “the past is not past” is one that several scholars developed in Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Postcolonial Theory, but one of its most memorable manifestations occurs in Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2017), which then went on to shape other influential scholarship such as Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireless Christoff, and Amy R. Wong’s “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (2020).

With respect to the Brontë sisters, their nineteenth-century novels have laid a powerful cultural foundation for how the Anglophone west understands romance and what it means to be cherished, chosen, and valued today. This foundation is as memorable as it is complex, since so many of the characters as well as the images, settings, symbols, and plots in the novels engage with, reinforce, or, at times, critique, ideologies that shaped British imperialism in the century that these novels were written in, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and elitism.

For example, when contextualizing a Brontë novel for students, I usually begin with the sisters’ childhood manuscripts, The Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, where—drawing from newspapers, magazines, and other materials in the Brontë family’s home—the sisters created fictional worlds where they grappled with topics such as British imperialism in Africa. My students and I discuss how these preoccupations shape the novels that the sisters wrote later on—visible in how, say, Mr. Rochester’s calculated seduction of the titular character in Jane Eyre occurs in a manor where he has imprisoned his first wife, the Jamaican woman Bertha Mason, for a decade.

To draw contemporary ideas of romance from Brontë novels such as Jane Eyre, then, is also to subliminally inherit an understanding of romance that is entangled with imperial ideologies, a topic that Doreen Thierauf in 2023 and, more recently, Anna Gibson in 2026, have written about based on their teaching experiences. Brontëgram encourages students to grapple with these concerns by exploring how some contemporary digital rhetorics, behaviors, and methods of self-presentation in digital arenas such as dating apps or online forums extend, refract, or complicate the understandings of romance that we have inherited from the nineteenth century through the cultural persistence of novels such as Jane Eyre. I was particularly open to a digital assignment since I had already built experience with digital rhetorics through my position as a Content and Social Media Manager for New York University’s Center for Data Science (CDS) before I began my doctorate, and had later encountered a model that combined my attention to the digital sphere with nineteenth-century literature from Lindsey O’Neil, who had invited her students create short, hypothetical posts for the “Am I The Asshole?” Reddit forum from the perspective of nineteenth-century characters, as part of her course.

Like the student posts from O’Neil’s class, the resulting social media profiles that my students create for the Brontëgram are satirical or exaggerated, peppered with humor and wit. Their playful responses do not reflect a lack of intellectual seriousness so much as an engagement with the constructedness of love and romance. While the experience of love can feel spontaneous or inexplicable, how love is identified, understood, expressed, gained, and lost is also informed by invented social and ideological scripts about what types of people—depending on their class, gender, nationality, race, sexuality, and more—are deserving, or not deserving, of love. To some critics, this realization may seem to strip love of its magic. Yet it also lays a fresh (and perhaps even more “magical”) foundation for expanding how we think of love and romance, for once they are perceived as constructions and inventions that operate according to a script, then that script—when seen for what it is—can be rewritten, reimagined, and reinvented outside of the British Empire’s long-standing grasp.

2. Decentering the Academic Essay.

The rise of generative AI has prompted debates about whether our methods for teaching and student assessment requires change. Every instructor will have their own position on the matter. An interesting approach that I have encountered, though, is decentering the traditional academic essay. This does not mean abandoning or erasing the essay wholesale, but perceiving it as only one way amongst many others to invite student learning. My openness to this perspective is indebted both to my background as an instructor of writing and composition before I became an instructor of literature as well as a recent pedagogy workshop at the 2025 North American Victorian Studies Annual Conference that I co-led with Sophia Hsu, my co-director at Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, where decentering the academic essay emerged as a shared concern amongst our participants.

Like most graduate students who later became professors, I began my teaching career not in a literature classroom, but in writing and composition. Based on the work done in digital rhetorics and multimodal assignments in Writing and Composition Studies, I selected digital writing as a thematic focus for the first undergraduate course that I taught as an Instructor of Record, operating with the belief that exploring how writing works online in spaces like Instagram and Wikipedia is as important as academic writing in a century that is becoming increasingly defined by digital and technological inventions.

This focus on writing on the screen and on the page has continued throughout my teaching career, but it was especially consequential when I arrived at the University of Iowa. The English Department and its affiliated programs are characterized by a strong emphasis on academic and creative work due to my colleagues’ award-winning strengths in scholarship and creative non-fiction writing. My classrooms were therefore populated with students who were predisposed to moving between formal academic writing and creative experimentations; who were attentive to the mechanics of craft, characterization, tone, and voice; who had a flair for imagination and risk-taking—students who were, therefore, particularly suited to an assignment such as Brontëgram. Indeed, the invitation to blend scholarship with creative writing to craft a specific voice and persona that resonated not only with the nineteenth-century novels that we were reading, but also with their own contemporary experience of the digital age, made my students reluctant to outsource this assignment to a generative AI model. As some of the anonymous student feedback forms colorfully conveyed to me, some were offended that I was even concerned about them using AI—and, ironically, it is precisely this feedback that brings a wave of relief to a humanities instructor.

3. Prioritizing Pedagogy.

It was a priority for me to share the student work and pedagogical approaches of the Brontëgram assignment due to the influential arguments outlined in the “Prioritizing Pedagogy in Victorian Studies” (2023) by Kimberly Cox, Riya Das, Shannon Draucker, Ashley Nadeau, Kate Nesbit, and Doreen Thierauf.

After drawing from statistical data to show how academic spaces in Victorian Studies are dominated by associate and full professors employed at R1 institutions despite the fact that non-R1 and teaching-heavy institutions house the vast majority of available faculty positions today, the writers argue that the survival of our field depends on building a culture where pedagogy is a keyword and where teaching is valued as much as research.

Citing one of my colleagues, David Gooblar, amongst other teacher-scholars, they point out how graduate students receive scant resources and training for teaching, particularly if they are attending R1-institutions, and how this pressures them to value research over pedagogy even though the jobs that they will later apply to, and presumably hold, will likely be positions at non-R1 and teaching-heavy institutions. Moreover, according to data from a 2018 survey by the American Association of University Professors, they point out how long-standing sexism in American academia means that only 36.3% of faculty holding tenured or tenure-track positions at doctoral institutions identify as women (compared to the 63.7% who are men). By contrast, women make up 53.8% of the part-time faculty members and 53.9% of the full-time faculty members for contingent and teaching-intensive faculty positions. When we devalue teaching, then, we are also implicitly devaluing women’s labor as well as the labor that the majority of our graduate students today will likely perform after they graduate.

I have little to add to the article’s arguments because its writers are correct. And part of the problem, as they point out, is that R1 institutions have historically played a role in devaluing teaching even as their own faculty today are facing ever-increasing classroom sizes and heavy teaching demands. Not wishing to replicate what they call “the R1-effect,” I created this website to contribute in some small way to the culture that these writers have urged us all to build—one where the work of teaching is showcased, reflected upon, and valued as much as published research, and one where pedagogical resources are widely offered in the same way resources are offered for research activities such as journal article writing, in order to support future graduate students and instructors. To that end, I hope that making space for resource-sharing and conversations about pedagogy through sites such as Brontëgram will be helpful.

More locally, I have also had the opportunity to prioritize pedagogy with the PhD candidates whom I mentor, such as my graduate research assistant and Assistant Director for this project, Josephine Geiger-Lee. Her detail-oriented involvement and impressive work ethic has been crucial to the fruition of this website. In turn, the project has not only given her the opportunity to reflect on pedagogical approaches as well as engage with her interest in the digital humanities, but also the opportunity to publish on this topic. Her digital humanities audit of comparable projects to Brontëgram is published under the “Resources” section. It showcases the different digital projects that have shaped this website as much as the broad pedagogical approaches outlined here, and acts as a model example for what a helpful and thorough audit document should look like. In Fall 2026, she will assist me with teaching the next iteration of the Brontëgram project, where students will engage with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Look out for her forthcoming teaching essay on this website soon.

Cherrie Kwok

University of Iowa