Academic interests
I study eighteenth-century British literature. My dissertation focused on Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Martha Fowke Sansom, and Laetitia Pilkington, early eighteenth-century women writers who clashed with their female contemporaries in print. I completed my dissertation work with the support of fellowships from AAUW and PEO, as well as from the University of Texas (see my CV for details), and defended in April 2011.
My first published article, “‘The Sole Business of Ladies in Romances’: Sharing Histories in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote,” appeared 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. I was also an assistant director of The eComma Project, a UT digital humanities initiative centered on the development of a collaborative online textual annotation system for use in the classroom and by research groups. For more about my involvement in the eComma Project, see my teaching page and my CV.
I am interested in text analysis using machine learning toolkits (such as MALLET and SEASR) and want to pursue this in future research projects. I’m hoping to have time soon to learn some basic regular expressions so that I will be able to pre-process texts myself.
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
- Archives
- Textual studies
- Text analysis
- Historiography (including critical historiography)
- Life narratives, biography, autobiography
- Patronage and authorship
- Women writers
- The rise(s) of the novel [TM Franco Moretti]
- Genre
- Structuralism and narratology
- Visual studies
- Romantic friendship
- Histories of reading
- 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 (I dabbled in East Asian Studies in college, and might have majored in it if I’d started earlier)
