A Definitive New Collection on H. G. Wells, Edited by Dean Sarah Cole, Now Out with Oxford University Press

Dean of the School of the Arts and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature Sarah Cole has co-edited The Oxford Handbook of H. G. Wells (Oxford University Press, 2026), a comprehensive overview of the life and work of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Best known today for his groundbreaking contributions to science fiction—which in many ways established the genre over the next 100+ years—Wells was a futurist and prophetic social critic who coined terms like "time machine," "war of the worlds," and "atomic bomb," and whose dedication to writing great novels about the problems of social class followed in the lineage of Charles Dickens. He was a four-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature and his novels The War of the Worlds and The First Men on the Moon earned him craters on both Mars and the Moon named in his honor.

Co-edited with fellow Wells scholar Duncan Bell across the pond at the University of Cambridge and written by a diverse, international team of multidisciplinary Wells scholars, the book offers analyses of Wells's most important individual works—including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Outline of History—alongside explorations of broader themes across his novels, short stories, and his journalistic, sociological, historical, and political writings, which covered topics such as evolutionary theory, technology, time, empire, socialism, race, eugenics, feminism, war, and the natural environment. While the volume clocks in at a whopping 47 chapters and nearly 700 pages, it was written to be accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike.

In 2014, Cole was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Literary Criticism for her scholarship on Wells. In 2019, she published Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century with Columbia University Press, in which she reimagines the modernist movement with Wells at the center. "He was one of the great imaginers from the 20th century," Cole told Ellice Lueders in a recent interview for the School of the Arts' faculty profile series, This is Who We Are. "He believed that literature is there to make changes in the world now—that the novel could be an activist, interventionist genre or form."    

A specialist in literary modernism, Cole is currently working on a book about the protest novel. She was the co-founder of the area-wide NYNJ Modernism Seminar and teaches courses in literary modernism and other topics in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has published articles in journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, and Modern Fiction Studies, and is the author of three books: the award-winning Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (Columbia, 2019), At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford, Modernist Literature and Culture series, 2012), and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, 2003). Cole has a longstanding interest in war, and as Dean of Humanities founded the Humanities War and Peace Initiative.

The Oxford Handbook of H. G. Wells is available to read in ebook form on many library websites.