Provost's Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Scholar
Department of English
The University of Chicago
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

Office: Rosenwald 415C
Phone: (773) 702-2206
nmwright@uchicago.edu

Centering on eighteenth-century British literature, my research interests span the history of the novel. The epistemological capacity of literature of this period is a common emphasis of the subfields that interest me, uniting such apparently disparate areas as literature and the history of science, utopian and dystopian writing, and law and literature. That is, I am interested in post-Enlightenment literature's preoccupation with describing methods of knowledge-seeking, illuminating popular (yet, frequently, tacit) beliefs about the nature of the world, and scrutinizing conventional wisdom.

I focus on literary works that depict household or community-based procedures of arbitration and judgment. These informal domestic systems of appraisal could supplement or substitute for the official legal system, with its glacial pace, biased verdicts, and harsh punishments. Portrayals of these alternative methods of judgment reveal authors' doubts concerning the fairness of the justice system. Such works treat charged issues such as legal representation, standards of proof, mitigating factors, and sentencing. Currently, I am expanding the range of my objects of study from the work of authors such as Henry Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott to encompass later American writings.

I am also interested in filling gaps in the fossil record of the history of the novel and the history of science by showing how some women writers were key figures in introducing scientific methods to a popular audience.

Courses

Undergraduate: Guilt by Association? Responsibility, Reparation, and the 18th-Century Novel

Selected Publications

• "Opening the Phosphoric 'Envelope': Scientific Appraisal and (Un)'Reasonable Creatures' in Edgeworth's Belinda," Eighteenth-Century Fiction (forthcoming)

Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 2011. Teaching at Chicago 2011-13.