Jon Michael Varese

Jon Michael Varese (born December 17, 1971) is an American novelist and literary historian.

Early life and education

Varese was born in Miami, Florida. He was first introduced to literature and the work of Charles Dickens at the age of 14 through the mother of a friend. He later graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in English Literature, and earned his Masters and Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. His doctoral thesis, “The Value of Storytelling,” examined the development of 19th-century serial novels in Great Britain, with a focus on the early novels of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot.

Career

Fiction

Varese's debut novel, The Spirit Photographer (Overlook Press, 2018), is loosely based on the real life 19th-century American spirit photographer, William Mumler. Varese took parts of Mumler’s biography and adapted them to create a story about the ghost of an African-American woman who one day appears in one of the photographs. The novel takes place during the Reconstruction era in U.S. History, and deals heavily with issues of northern and southern racism in post-Civil War America. He has cited the work of civil rights activists Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander as important influences on the novel.

PopMatters said that The Spirit Photographer was "atmospheric, lyrical, and poignant", and that it "deftly interweaves strands of history and fantasy." Booklist called the novel "an addicting tale," and Chronogram Magazine wrote that it was an ambitious, sprawling debut, "teeming with spirits, secrets, and trauma." The Times Literary Supplement stated that there was not "a dud word in this extraordinary debut novel," and compared Varese's writing to that of Wilkie Collins and Joseph Conrad.

The novel also received attention from academicians. American Literature scholar Susan Gillman wrote that the novel unexpectedly brought "race and Southern Gothic to the world of Boston after the Civil War," and that "ghosts of a different kind" haunted national memory in this "groundbreaking new historical novel." American Civil War historian Bruce Levine called the novel "stunning," writing that The Spirit Photographer combined "the thrills of mystery and fantasy with the feel of historical authenticity."

Nonfiction and literary criticism

Varese’s nonfiction and literary criticism have focused on the work of Charles Dickens, particularly Dickens’s early novels and the business behind their development. Varese’s edition of Great Expectations was published under the Signature imprint of Barnes and Noble publishers in 2012. Similarly, Varese has published numerous public humanities articles that recast topics in Victorian literature for general audiences, including a series of pieces that he wrote for The Guardian from 2009-2010.

Varese was an original contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens. His chapter on Nicholas Nickleby examined the role of contracts and English contract law in relation to Dickens’s fiction during a time when concepts like copyright, intellectual property, and royalty payments were all still being formulated and debated in both professional and legal spheres.

Teaching and outreach work

Varese served as the Director of Digital Initiatives for The Dickens Project from 2010-2016, but earlier directed the development of the Our Mutual Friend Scholarly Pages (1998), a collaborative digital archive co-sponsored by The Dickens Project and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The collaboration was amongst the first of a handful of digital archiving projects to appear on the Internet, and was later overhauled for the bi-centenary of Dickens’s birth in 2012.

In 2016, Varese was named Director of Public Outreach for The Dickens Project, a role he still occupies. In his capacity as director he is responsible for liaison work between The Dickens Project and the University of Southern California’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI), USC’s primary outreach program to Title 1 schools in South Central Los Angeles. The partnership between The Dickens Project and USC NAI provides books, curricula advisement, mentorship, and funding for students who are on a dedicated college-bound path as a result of the program.