Literature and religion

History of humanities

Critical theory

Victorian literature and culture

Modernist literature

Gender and sexuality studies

Education

• Ph.D., M.A., Literatures in English, Rutgers University—New Brunswick
• B.A., Language and Literature, Bard College

Research Interests

Mimi Winick, Ph.D., is the incoming Powell-Edwards Professorship for Religion and the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work investigates how theories of religion and aesthetics have shaped, and been shaped by, spiritual and artistic practices in the Anglophone world since the late eighteenth century. Her interdisciplinary approach to religion and the arts is informed by archival research, literary analysis, and critical theory, with particular attention to how metaphors of gender, race, and religion intersect in histories and practices of art and knowledge.

Winick was recently an American Council of Learned Societies Grantee which enabled her to advance her book project on late Victorian feminist theorists of religion and their invention of a secret history of feminist spirituality. 

Her essays on religion and literature have appeared in journals including MLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Modernism/modernity, and in edited collections such as The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth, and Religion (2023). Winick was also a selected participant in the New Museum (NYC) research and development seminar, “Speculation,” and curated the exhibition, “Scholarly Collaboration for a Feminist New Age: Women Scholars at the Cambridge University Press” at Cambridge University Press (UK). She serves on the executive committee for the Anthropology and Literature Forum of the Modern Language Association and the editorial board for the Political Theology Network’s Literature & Political Theology symposia.

Prior to VCU, she was a research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School and an inaugural fellow on the Transcendence and Transformation initiative at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. 

Select Publications

• “Jessie L. Weston,” in Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing (500-1525 CE) (2024), edited by Diane Watt, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Michelle Sauer.
• “Global Seekers in The Quest: Occult Periodicals and Worldly Religion,” The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion, eds. Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford, Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
• Co-authored with Winter J. Werner, “How to See Global Religion: Comparativism, Connectivity, and ‘Undisciplining’ Victorian Literary Studies,”MLQ 83.4 (2022): 499–520. (special issue, “Talking About Religion in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Studies”)
• “The Sophisticated Amateur: Vernon Lee versus the Vital Liars,” in The Critic as Amateur, eds. Saikat Majumdar and Aarthi Vadde, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
• “Jane Harrison’s Ritual Scholarship,” in Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness, eds. Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, and Heather Walton, Palgrave, 2016.
• “Scholarly Enchantment,” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 73.2 (September): 187-226. (special issue on new religious movements and secularization)
• “Modernist Feminist Witchcraft: Margaret Murray’s Fantastic Scholarship and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Realist Fantasy,” Modernism/modernity 22.3 (2015): 565-592.

Courses

• Global Ethics and the World’s Religions
• Magic, Religion, and Witchcraft
• Spirituality and the Feminist Imagination
• Literary Theory
• Women Writers

Awards

• ACLS Project Development Grant, 2023
• College of Humanities and Sciences Faculty Council Professional Development Grant, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2020
• Humanities Research Center Conference Travel Award, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019
• Dean’s Research Award, Rutgers University, 2017
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar: “Postsecular Studies and the Rise of the English Novel,” Iowa City, IA, 2016