Pre-1900 Research

Timothy Campbell: My research focuses upon the literature and culture of eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain, and especially upon the visual-cultural and consumer-material practices of the age that helped reshape literature into new and long-enduring forms.  I also have broad interests in the history and theory of fashion, in problems of historical method in literary studies, and in the forms of historiographical writing.  In recent work I have addressed subjects ranging from the history of the fashion plate to Romantic antiquarianism, and from the fashionable, eighteenth-century portraiture of Sir Joshua Reynolds to the present-day conceptual dress art of Christian Boltanski.

James Chandler: My research and teaching interests include the Romantic movement; the study of lyric poetry; the history of the novel; relations between politics and literature, history and criticism; the Scottish Enlightenment; modern Irish literature and culture; the sentimental mode; cinema studies; and the history of humanities disciplines.

Alexis Chema: I specialize in Romantic literature and culture, with particular interest in poetry, visual art, and the civic functions they have been engaged to serve. The book I am writing, Fascinating Graces: Poetry and the Arts of Communication, is about changes to the public sphere over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the impacts these changes had on poetry—who wrote and read it, how it circulated, and, most of all, on how matters of language and style adapt to the perceived conditions of mass reading. 

Emily Coit: I specialize in transatlantic literary and intellectual history. My teaching and research focus on conversations about education, citizenship, and democracy in the US and Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I'm especially interested in the histories of higher education, whiteness, and feminism. 

Frances Ferguson: I work primarily on eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Some years back I published "Rape and the Rise of the Novel" on Richardson's Clarissa and I have written more recently on topics like pornography, education, and literary persuasion.

Recently I taught a graduate course called "Poetic Realism" about late eighteenth and early nineteenth century poetry that aimed to capture the subjects and rhythms of ordinary life and one called "Hymns" in which read the Psalms and eighteenth-century congregational hymns to think about the importance of the rise of the congregational hymn as a literary form. In fall 2021 I will teach a course focused on Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which will be open to MAPH and PhD students.

Elaine Hadley: I teach and write about nineteenth-century British culture, a period that has generously left behind a wide range of materials to examine. I've been especially committed in recent years to thinking about popular culture broadly defined (theater, journalism, cheap fiction) and political culture, especially liberalism as a social formation. 

Timothy Harrison: I am the author of Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2020). My current research focuses on the relationship between Renaissance and early modern literary texs, the first-person perspective, and the history of concepts across languages and cultures. I have taught such graduate courses as: The Uses of Fiction: Poetry and Philosophy in Early Modernity; Early Modern Natality; The Being of Effort in Early Modernity; and Milton and the Literature of Origins.

Heather Keenleyside: My teaching and research interests center on eighteenth-century literature (including the novel, poetry, philosophy, natural history, and children’s literature), as well as on animal studies, intellectual history, and the history of criticism.

Ellen MacKay: As a specialist in theatre in performance, I focus on events and conditions that blur the line between representation and enactment. My first book, Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England, shows how the playhouse’s reputation as a place where nothing actually happens makes theatre capable of reducing its age to nothing. I am currently researching the forms of collective life said to bloom under theatrical regimes of immersion. I lead a digital project, Beshrew Me! that identifies, illustrates and glosses the techniques of supremacy and subordination that are used to tame the wild and/or disobedient. 

Josephine McDonagh: I focus on 19th-century British and colonial literature, in the context of globalization. Recent and ongoing work is on migration. My new book, Literature in a Time of Migration:  British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 (Oxford University Press), came out in June. I'm also interested in the global circulation of books and things, and the metropolitan and provincial cultures of empire. 

Mark Miller: My work is situated historically in late-medieval literature and culture, and conceptually in the intersections of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory with ethics, theory of action, and philosophical psychology. My book Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge University Press, 2004) investigates the ways Chaucer's philosophical interests can help us read his representations of gender and sexuality; one of its main concerns is to understand the often tortured logics of erotic desire and romantic love.

W.J.T. Mitchell: I teach in both the English and the Art History departments and edit the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. I work particularly on the history and theories of media, visual art, and literature, from the eighteenth century to the present. My work explores the relations of visual and verbal representations in the culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). 

Benjamin Morgan: My research and teaching focus on literature, science, and aesthetics in the Victorian period and early twentieth century. My particular areas of interest include nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion; aestheticism and decadence; and speculative and science fiction. I also write about topics in the environmental humanities including extinction, energy cultures, and the literary history of climate change. My approach is oriented by critical traditions in aesthetic theory, affect theory, and science studies.

Noémie Ndiaye: I am the author of Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), the co-editor (with Lia Markey) of the forthcoming RaceB4Race® volume Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Pre-modern World (ACMRS Press, 2023), and the guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly on Shakespeare studies and Early Modern Critical Race Studies (2023).

Julie Orlemanski: My research focuses on texts from the Middle Ages and the intersection of medieval thought with present-day theories and notions. My most recent project on Prosopopeia in Medieval Writing studies the movement from text to speech to imagined corporealization in medieval texts. 

Benjamin Saltzman: I research and teach the literature and culture of early medieval England, focusing on texts written in Old English and Anglo-Latin roughly between the seventh century and the eleventh. My first book is entitled Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Penn, 2019). I also work on and teach graduate courses around modernity’s engagements with the Middle Ages; I am coauthoring Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, forthcoming). And I am currently writing a new book: Gestures of Aversion, a study of looking away from suffering in premodern art and literature.

Joshua Scodel: My major field of research is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary history in relation to intellectual, cultural, and political history. Special interests include early modern English literature's engagements with classical and Renaissance continental literature and philosophy; Renaissance genre theory and practice; and literary criticism's relation to literary practice, ancient to early modern.

Eric Slauter: My scholarship focuses chiefly on transformations in political thought and behavior in the eighteenth century. My first book, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, examined the relation of culture to politics in revolutionary America. I was especially interested there in how the emergent state was challenged in its effort to sustain inalienable natural rights alongside slavery and to achieve political secularization at a moment of growing religious expression. In another book project, Natural Rights: A Cultural History, 1689-1789, I hope to explain how and why ordinary people came to believe they had rights before and through the Revolution.I specialize in early American cultural, intellectual, and literary history, with additional research and teaching interests in a range of fields and methods: legal history; the history of political thought; book history; visual and material culture studies; quantitative analysis; the history of slavery, abolition, and emancipation; labor history; environmental history; and Atlantic history.

Christopher Taylor: My research and teaching focus on the hemispheric Americas in the nineteenth century. While the British West Indies is my primary area of focus, I am interested in how these islands were linked to worlds beyond the boundaries of the British Empire. Working at the edges of economic history, political theory, and literary studies, I study how West Indian creoles drew on the ideas and texts that circulated through these entangled worlds to develop norms and model polities opposed to slavery, economic liberalism, and expansionist imperialism.

SJ Zhang: My research and teaching are both concerned with seventeenth through nineteenth-century archives of slavery and marronage in the United States and Caribbean. I am interested in how resistance practices and flight from enslavement by Black and Native individuals in the Caribbean and North America shaped textual and visual production in the colonial period. I teach transnational literary histories of slave and maroon narratives, constructions of gender, race and forms of bondage before 1850, as well as courses on archival theory and method.