Jesse Rosenthal's research and teaching interests focus on the Victorian novel, and the theory of the novel more generally. His first book, entitled Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel  (Princeton University Press, 2017), examines the role of intuition in 19th-century understandings of both moral experience and the feeling of novel-reading. He also co-edited (with Adam Grener) a special issue of journal Genre, on "Narrative against Data in the Victorian Novel."

He is currently working on a book about the development of the idea of tradition, in relation to literary studies and social thought. 

"Keeping Secrets." MLQ 80.1 (March 2019). Special Issue: "Gender, History, and the Novel: Desire and Domestic Fiction after Thirty Years." (March 2019).

"The Untrusted Medium: Open Networks, Secret Writing, and Little Dorrit." Victorian Studies 59.2 (Winter 2017).

"Narrative against Data" Introduction to special issue co-edited with Adam Grener. Genre 50.1 (March 2017).

"Some Thoughts on Time Travel." Part of special symposium on "strategic presentism." Victorian Studies 59.1 (Autumn 2016)

"Maintenance Work: On Tradition and Development." b2o: an online journal

"The Newgate Novel." in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

"Wit and Humor." in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

"Being in the Plot: Action, Intuition, and Trolleys." boundary 2 40.2 (Summer 2013)

"The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers, or Why George Eliot Hates Gambling." ELH 77.3 (Fall 2010)