Professor Michie is the author of five books in Victorian studies and the study of gender and sexuality, including: Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (Cambridge UP 2006); The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies (Oxford UP 1987); Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (Oxford UP 1991); and Confinements: Fertility and Infertility in Contemporary United States Culture (Rutgers UP 1997), with her college roommate and law professor, Naomi R. Cahn. Her most recent book, Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor, with Robyn Warhol, was the winner of NAVSA’s 2015 award for the Best Book of the Year.

Michie’s commitment to “widening” nineteenth-century studies has resulted in two co-edited projects: the essay collection Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (Rutgers UP 2002), with Ronald R. Thomas; and the special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on the “Wide Nineteenth-Century”, co-edited with Sukanya Banerjee and Ryan D. Fong. From the beginning, many of the projects with which she has engaged experiment with academic forms and genres.

She is currently at work on two projects: the first, a series of essays on rhetorics of history, which has resulted in several articles on topics, from periodicity and simultaneity to historicist syntax. One such article on the overlooking of Arab traces in Sicily, “Deep History, Surface Histories: British Writing About Sicily in the Age of Archeology,” will appear in the next issue of Victorian Studies. Secondly, she is transforming a three-year long weekly blog, “Homing,” into a book of essays on the domestic ideal in times of disaster.

Professor Michie has been a Guggenheim and an NEH fellow , and teaches courses in feminist theory, literary theory, and Victorian literature and culture. She also teaches classes and workshops on professional writing. She has served over the years in many administrative positions, including English Department Chair, director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the founding Faculty Advisory Board Chair for Rice’s Program in Writing and Communication.