Ann C. Colley spent the first thirteen years of her life in England (in Lancashire and London). She then came with her parents to live in the United States. She spent part of a year in Boston; a year in Newport, Rhode Island, and eventually moved to Charlottesville, Virginia where she attended Lane High School.
She won a music scholarship and became a student at the College of William & Mary. Upon graduation she entered the graduate English program at the University of Virginia. After receiving an MA from the University of Virginia, she entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago and received her doctorate in English in March 1983.
Her first teaching experience (other than part-time teaching at the Chicago Circle Campus) was at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She was a tenured Assistant Professor from 1969 to 1982. Professor Colley then moved to Buffalo where she has been on the English Faculty at SUNY College at Buffalo. In 2009 she was awarded the SUNY Distinguished Professorship. Professor Colley has twice been a Fulbright Senior Fellow: The University of Warsaw, Poland from 1995-1996; and Schevchenko University, Kiev, Ukraine, from 1999 to 2000. Most recently, in 2011 and again in 2014, she became a Senior Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge (UK).
Professor Colley’s interest is in Victorian literature and culture. A list of her books follows:
Wild Animal skins in Victorian Britian: Zoos, Collections, Portraits and Maps. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014.
Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination. Aldershot, England:
Ashgate, 2004.
Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan,
1998.
Edward Lear and the Critics. Camden House, 1993.
The Search for Synthesis in Literature and Art: The Paradox of Space. Athens: The
University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Tennyson and Madness. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983.
Starting with Poetry. With Judith K. Moore. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973.
Professor Colley’s articles have appeared in such journals as Victorian Literature and Culture, The Kenyon Review, Victorian Poetry, Studies in English Literature, The Centennial Review, Word & Image, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, The Journal of Stevenson Studies, and Rivista di Studi Vittoriani.
Professor Colley has published chapters in numerous books and anthologies of critical essays.
