Christina Gilligan specializes in nineteenth-century literature, gender studies, and the law. Her current manuscript, Readerly Identification from Austen to Hardy, analyzes the forms through which identification is courted and resisted in the realist novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. While critics have long associated the nineteenth-century British novel with the uncritical (or even embarrassing) encouragement of identification, this project demonstrates that the identificatory engagements of these authors were marked by ambivalence and reflexivity. Indeed, the project maintains that the questions it poses about the powers, pleasures, and limitations of identification, as well as its suitability for specific kinds of ethical and political projects, were also open questions for these authors, who attempted to grapple with them through formal experimentation and shifts in their novelistic projects. An article taken from her first chapter on Jane Austen is forthcoming from Nineteenth-Century Literature. 

She is also at work on a law and the humanities project that brings the Black feminist framework of reproductive justice to bear on representations of reproductive harm in Anglophone novels of the late-nineteenth century, a time of increasing legal, medical, and administrative restriction of bodily autonomy and reproductive liberty in Britain and its colonies.