Academic interests
I study eighteenth-century British literature. I’m writing a dissertation on Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Martha Fowke Sansom, and Laetitia Pilkington, early eighteenth-century women writers who clashed with their female contemporaries in print. (For a copy of my dissertation abstract, please email me at katharinebeutner at gmail dot com.) I have received two dissertation completion awards to fund my work on this project through the 2010-2011 school year and plan to defend in spring 2011. As of August 2010, I have (roughly!) drafted the body of the dissertation and am revising its first two chapters.
My first published article, “‘The Sole Business of Ladies in Romances’: Sharing Histories in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote,” is forthcoming in May 2011 in the volume Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s, edited by Susan Carlile and published by Lehigh University Press.
At UT, I founded the eighteenth century interest group in the English department. (We began rather ambitiously a few years ago by reading Clarissa in real time; this year, we’re planning happy hours, talks, and research gatherings.)
More information about my teaching; a link to my CV.
Eighteenth century people of interest, including some of the stars of my dissertation:
- Samuel Johnson
- Richard Savage
- Eliza Haywood
- Aaron Hill
- Charlotte Lennox
- Emma Hamilton
- Charlotte Charke
- Jane Austen
- Laetitia Pilkington
- Delarivier Manley
Topics of interest:
- Digital humanities
- Historiography (including critical historiography)
- Biography and autobiography
- Patronage and authorship
- Women writers
- The rise(s) of the novel [TM Franco Moretti]
- Genre
- Structuralism and narratology
- Visual studies
- Romantic friendship
- Eighteenth-century models of femininity
- The rhetoric of prostitution in the eighteenth century
- The history and rhetoric of charity
Other genres and time periods I’m interested in:
- Victorian novels
- Renaissance poetry and drama
- Modernist poetry and fiction
- Prehistoric and classical Greece
- Han China and Chinese lyric poetry in translation
