“Whoever is appointed must be a known quantity,” Buell said. “It was important to us that her work had received a high level of acclaim and achievement from the outside world.”

More unusual is Price’s promotion just two years after she was appointed an assistant professor.

“The humanities are unlike the sciences, where people often do their best work by age 30 or 35,” Fisher said.

Price began her education at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in literature in 1991. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received a Hoopes Prize for her thesis “Lery and Cervantes.”

She received a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale University in 1998 and spent the next three years as a research fellow in England, at Cambridge University.

Price is on leave this year at the Stanford University Humanities Center, where she is conducting research for her next book project on the “secretarial imagination” and novels in the age of communication.

A specialist in the Victorian novel, Price has published broadly on 19th- and 20th-century British fiction, especially how anthologies, abridgements and compilations of quotations have changed the way the novels have been received.

“She brings a kind of quirky, fresh, subversive account of the real-life of novels to her classes,” Fisher said.

Price has taught several courses at Harvard, including a freshman seminar “Victorian Literature and Technology,” an introductory course “Rhetorics of Reading” and honors seminars “Sexing Victorian Fiction” and “Gender Writing in Victorian Culture.”