Julia Stern

About

Julia Stern is the Henry Sanborn Noyes Professor of Literature, Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, and Professor of English at Northwestern University. Her intellectual focus is on American narratives and novels, analyzed through theories of emotion, including object relations psychoanalysis and histories of affect, as they manifest in specific literary modes such as melodrama, gothic, and sentimental forms. She has authored three books: The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel, which was a finalist for the MLA's First Book Prize; Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic, the first full-length literary study of Chesnut's revised Civil War narrative; and Bette Davis Black and White, exploring Davis's collaboration with Black actors and community leaders during and after WWII, highlighting her anti-racism and occasional racist lapses, and connecting her work in melodrama, gothic, and sentimental genres to the genealogy of American women's writing. Stern offers courses in 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century American literature, with a focus on women's and African American writing, the sentimental and gothic, Faulkner, and the films of Bette Davis. Throughout her career at Northwestern, she has been recognized for her teaching with numerous awards, including the Faculty Honor Roll, the Weinberg College's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Herman & Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professorship, the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship…

Research topics

• Physics
• Astrophysics
• Astronomy

Selected publications

• Properties of the circumgalactic medium in cosmic ray-dominated galaxy haloes

  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society · 2020 · 158 citations

  ABSTRACT We investigate the impact of cosmic rays (CRs) on the circumgalactic medium (CGM) in FIRE-2 simulations, for ultra-faint dwarf through Milky Way (MW)-mass haloes hosting star-forming (SF) galaxies. Our CR treatment includes injection by supernovae, anisotropic streaming and diffusion along magnetic field lines, and collisional and streaming losses, with constant parallel diffusivity $\kappa \sim 3\times 10^{29}\, \mathrm{cm^2\ s^{-1}}$ chosen to match γ-ray observations. With this, CRs…

  DOI

• Characterizing mass, momentum, energy, and metal outflow rates of multiphase galactic winds in the FIRE-2 cosmological simulations

  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society · 2021 · 136 citations

  ABSTRACT We characterize mass, momentum, energy, and metal outflow rates of multiphase galactic winds in a suite of FIRE-2 cosmological ‘zoom-in’ simulations from the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. We analyse simulations of low-mass dwarfs, intermediate-mass dwarfs, Milky Way-mass haloes, and high-redshift massive haloes. Consistent with previous work, we find that dwarfs eject about 100 times more gas from their interstellar medium (ISM) than they form in stars, while this m…

  DOI

• Virialization of the Inner CGM in the FIRE Simulations and Implications for Galaxy Disks, Star Formation, and Feedback

  The Astrophysical Journal · 2021 · 128 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We use the FIRE-2 cosmological simulations to study the formation of a quasi-static, virial-temperature gas phase in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) at redshifts 0 < z < 5 and how the formation of this virialized phase affects the evolution of galactic disks. We demonstrate that when the halo mass crosses ∼10 12 M ⊙ , the cooling time of shocked gas in the inner CGM (∼0.1 R vir , where R vir is the virial radius) exceeds the local free-fall time. The inner CGM then experiences a t…

  DOI

• The Physical Origin of Positive Metallicity Radial Gradients in High-redshift Galaxies: Insights from the FIRE-2 Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations

  The Astrophysical Journal · 2025-06-17 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract Using the FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations, we investigate the temporal evolution of gas-phase metallicity radial gradients of Milky Way–mass progenitors in the redshift range of 0.4 < z < 3. We pay special attention to the occurrence of positive (i.e., inverted) metallicity gradients—where metallicity increases with galactocentric radius. This trend, contrary to the more commonly observed negative radial gradients, has been frequently seen in recent spatially resolved gris…

  PublisherDOI

• Ne viii in the Warm-hot Circumgalactic Medium of FIRE Simulations and in Observations

  The Astrophysical Journal · 2024-09-23 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The properties of warm-hot gas around ∼ L * galaxies can be studied with absorption lines from highly ionized metals. We predict Ne viii column densities from cosmological zoom-in simulations of halos with masses in ∼10 12 and ∼10 13 M ☉ from the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. Ne viii traces the volume-filling, virial-temperature gas in ∼10 12 M ☉ halos. In ∼10 13 M ☉ halos the Ne viii gas is clumpier, and biased toward the cooler part of the warm-hot phase. We compa…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Claude‐André Faucher‐Giguère

  53 shared

• Daniel Anglés-Alcázar

  Flatiron Health (United States)

  46 shared

• Zachary Hafen

  University of California, Irvine

  37 shared

• Drummond B. Fielding

  37 shared

• Philip F. Hopkins

  California Institute of Technology

  28 shared

• Dušan Kereš

  26 shared

• Andrew Wetzel

  25 shared

• Eliot Quataert

  24 shared

Awards & honors

• Robert Mayo Memorial Prize for Best English 300 Paper
• Robert Dentler Memorial Prizes
• Jean Meyer Aloe Poetry Prize from The American Academy of Po…
• J. Scott Clark Award for Outstanding Aptitude in Creative Wr…
• Helen G. Scott Prizes

Similar researchers at Northwestern University

• Matthew Davish-68
• Rachel Jamison Websterh-55
• Michelle N. Huangh-39