Past Members of the Month
Special Feature: Mentee and Mentor of the Month
Interviews by Nicole Mansfield Wright, Secretary, ASECS Women’s Caucus
Interviews by Nicole Mansfield Wright, Secretary, ASECS Women’s Caucus
Mentee: Lisa Vandenbossche, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, McNeese State University
Mentor: Katherine Mannheimer, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Rochester
Lisa on working with Katie:
1) How did you first connect with your mentor?
I began my doctorate program with the intention of specializing in Victorian literature. My very first class was Dr. Katherine Mannheimer’s 18th Century Literature course, and I was hooked. As I continued my graduate studies, Katie eventually became the Director of Graduate Studies who helped shape my professional career and an advisor on my dissertation who helped shape my research: she has pushed me to be a much better teacher and scholar.
2) What qualities set your mentor apart from others you’ve encountered along your path as a graduate student/early career academic?
On a professional level, Katie’s feedback (verbal and written) is hands down the best that I have ever received. Katie’s own scholarship is a model of what I want mine to look like. It is thoughtful and nuanced, as well as impeccably argued and researched. She pushes the work of those around her to match her own rigor as a scholar. She is unbelievably detail oriented, which comes across in both sentence-level language suggestions and in more global promptings. She challenges you to think carefully about arguments and evidence, in a way that is constructive and leads to much stronger final work.
On a personal level, Katie is always there to offer support. Unlike so many other mentors, she responds to emails quickly and goes out of her way to talk with you. Even when she is at her busiest, you don’t know it, because she rearranges her schedule to be available when you need advice the most. And her advice is spot on: I could not have navigated the complexity of a new job and pregnancy without her help.
3) Can you share an anecdote that captures your mentor’s personality/impact/sense of humor/anything special you’d like to highlight?
Katie had a baby twice during the time I was a graduate student (I don’t know if this says more about her timing or how long it took me to finish my degree…). This is not an easy thing to do while completing manuscript projects, teaching classes, becoming Director of Graduate Studies, etc. As a result, she taught all of us in the program an important lesson about work life balance, and helped us believe that we too could have families and academic careers.
One of my favorite memories in this regard was at a cohort meeting that we had with Katie in our fourth year. We were all sitting down for most of the meeting, so a lot of people did not realize that she was pregnant Toward the end of the meeting, someone dropped papers on the floor. Katie got up to pick them up, despite being really far along in her pregnancy. One of the men in my cohort expressed his surprise: “wow, what is that?” Not missing a beat, Katie answered, “a baby.” Writing about the exchange still makes me laugh. More than that, it is a moment that illustrates the strange position in which female faculty find themselves. Katie normalized the experience in a way that it often is not within academia, and she will always be my heroine for it. I hope that my students say that same thing about me.
4) How did your mentor influence your work in eighteenth-century studies, specifically? OR: What are some barriers, as you see it, to establishing positive mentorship relationships in higher education and/or eighteenth-century studies?
Early in my graduate program, I was applying for a fellowship to a Folger Shakespeare Library seminar. The personal statement required me to conceptualize a final dissertation project that was very much in its infancy at the time. Katie worked with me over the course of countless drafts and starts and stops. It was the most painful document I have ever created, and it ended up being one of my favorite articulations of what would become my dissertation project. What sticks with me the most when I think about this process is that Katie’s mother died during this period, yet she still found the time to shepherd me through this process. That fellowship kickstarted my own research and helped me find my place in the field.
My research is transoceanic in nature. I study narratives by and about sailors as a nexus between literature and reform movements in the 18th century. In order to make this work as a dissertation project, my committee consisted of advisors in British and American literature. This required a great deal of flexibility on behalf of faculty members. I could not have done it, if Katie hadn’t been willing to help me think outside the box in creating a project and then finding a committee who would support that project.
As Director of Graduate studies, Katie was instrumental in helping develop training opportunities for alternative career plans outside of academia for students. It was at her suggestion that I got involved helping with social media for the Women’s Caucus!
We all know how bad the academic job market is, and there is increasing pressure to rethink graduate studies as a result. One of the toughest roles for mentees of graduate students and early career scholars right now is helping them navigate this reality. Katie was realistic in acknowledging what this market looks like and in helping support skills that made students competitive both within and outside the academy. It is these outside skills that made me a more competitive applicant for teaching jobs. Just as importantly, however, I felt that Katie would support any decision that I made in my future career. I never felt pressure to find an academic job (or to only look at academic jobs), which I am grateful for. We need more mentors like her who are willing to do this kind of work.
5) As you continue in your own career as a scholar, what did you glean from your mentor that will guide your approach with your own students?
Academia can be an isolating place for graduate students and early career faculty, especially as you navigate your own teaching for the first time and you move away from the comfort of your
graduate program. One way to help with this is strong mentorship connections between established faculty and early career scholars. As we start first jobs, it can feel professional support networks from graduate school disappear (coupled with the fact that geographic displacement changes personal networks). Beyond professional connections, personal connections are vital. Mentors who take an interest (and acknowledge) the lives of their mentees outside of research and teaching help build community for young scholars when they need it most.
When my son was born, one of the first gifts that we received was a box of books from Katie; many of which are his favorite bed time stories. Every time I read them to him, I am reminded how lucky I am to have done graduate school under the guidance of a strong female mentor, and how grateful I am for this. I seek to be the same to my own graduate students, as they attempt to balance the demands of scholarship, teaching, and personal lives outside the classroom. Rather than ignoring those personal lives, I hope to be a voice who helps them navigate the complexities of these competing interests and be a support for important life events that occur in and outside of the classroom.
On a surface level, I also respond to emails far more quickly than I otherwise would have and work to match the level of feedback that I received from Katie, as I know how comforting that is on the other side of it! This may be the most important mentorship lesson that Katie taught me.
Katie on mentorship:
1. Identify three points in a graduate student's career when an advisor's/mentor's support is particularly important.
a. Just after the student's qualifying exams, there's a really crucial stock-taking that occurs, when students think back through everything they've read over the past months and start to draw connections, locate their true interests, and identify through-lines. Exam preparation itself is often fairly solitary, but this is the moment when a conversation can do so much.
b. I think many people would deem the first chapter of the dissertation to be the most fundamental one, or the intro/conclusion. But to me it seems like it's midway through the dissertation-writing process that's crucial: this is when students really start to figure out what the dissertation is about, and where it needs to go.
c. Another moment when mentorship is helpful, though perhaps not for the reasons we think of first, is at the Job-Market stage. Increasingly, I hope, we're coming to recognize that our conversations around post-PhD job options can't just be about what's the "best" job; we also have to address quality of life, institutional culture, community, family, and so on. I've had more than one conversation with female students in particular about how the sometimes circuitous route from post-doc to VAP to etc. intersects (or not) with one's ability to become a parent.
2. Specific steps I take as a mentor:
To me, some of the most helpful feedback an advisor can give, from early on, is around the larger intellectual stakes of a student's work. I suppose it's really less about feedback than about asking questions: OK, this is a great reading of this scene / stanza / etc., but what's the bigger picture? Helping students to articulate that is one of the most important (and enjoyable) roles that I think an advisor takes on.
3. What is one memorable aspect of your time working with Lisa?
One of the most memorable aspects of my time working with Lisa, truly, was how much she did without any help at all from me! She successfully applied for a grant to take a seminar at the Folger Library; she was selected to teach a course through the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies here at the University of Rochester; she received a Dissertation Prospectus Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council ... It was all totally amazing and had pretty much nothing to do with me.
4. How do I balance research and advising—any advice?
Ha. No advice; but I guess I'd just say I appreciate the way that advising graduate students forces you to read things you'd never have read otherwise. This doesn't advance my own research per se, but it helps me continue to broaden my knowledge of the long eighteenth century.
5. What is your current research focus?
I'm close (I hope) to finishing a book on Restoration drama and the rise of an eighteenth-century English canon in print.
Restoration dramatists were writing, of course, in the wake of a twenty-year period during which plays were widely reprinted and read, but not performed. My book considers how this lopsided access to drama affected how plays were written once the theatres reopened.
Specifically I argue that Restoration playwrights were uniquely aware of drama's "neither/nor" status as an artform that straddles page and stage, and that they leveraged this doubleness in their own plays in order to question print-centric notions of canonicity and "high" literary culture that had begun to emerge in the Interregnum years.
Mentor: Katherine Mannheimer, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Rochester
Lisa on working with Katie:
1) How did you first connect with your mentor?
I began my doctorate program with the intention of specializing in Victorian literature. My very first class was Dr. Katherine Mannheimer’s 18th Century Literature course, and I was hooked. As I continued my graduate studies, Katie eventually became the Director of Graduate Studies who helped shape my professional career and an advisor on my dissertation who helped shape my research: she has pushed me to be a much better teacher and scholar.
2) What qualities set your mentor apart from others you’ve encountered along your path as a graduate student/early career academic?
On a professional level, Katie’s feedback (verbal and written) is hands down the best that I have ever received. Katie’s own scholarship is a model of what I want mine to look like. It is thoughtful and nuanced, as well as impeccably argued and researched. She pushes the work of those around her to match her own rigor as a scholar. She is unbelievably detail oriented, which comes across in both sentence-level language suggestions and in more global promptings. She challenges you to think carefully about arguments and evidence, in a way that is constructive and leads to much stronger final work.
On a personal level, Katie is always there to offer support. Unlike so many other mentors, she responds to emails quickly and goes out of her way to talk with you. Even when she is at her busiest, you don’t know it, because she rearranges her schedule to be available when you need advice the most. And her advice is spot on: I could not have navigated the complexity of a new job and pregnancy without her help.
3) Can you share an anecdote that captures your mentor’s personality/impact/sense of humor/anything special you’d like to highlight?
Katie had a baby twice during the time I was a graduate student (I don’t know if this says more about her timing or how long it took me to finish my degree…). This is not an easy thing to do while completing manuscript projects, teaching classes, becoming Director of Graduate Studies, etc. As a result, she taught all of us in the program an important lesson about work life balance, and helped us believe that we too could have families and academic careers.
One of my favorite memories in this regard was at a cohort meeting that we had with Katie in our fourth year. We were all sitting down for most of the meeting, so a lot of people did not realize that she was pregnant Toward the end of the meeting, someone dropped papers on the floor. Katie got up to pick them up, despite being really far along in her pregnancy. One of the men in my cohort expressed his surprise: “wow, what is that?” Not missing a beat, Katie answered, “a baby.” Writing about the exchange still makes me laugh. More than that, it is a moment that illustrates the strange position in which female faculty find themselves. Katie normalized the experience in a way that it often is not within academia, and she will always be my heroine for it. I hope that my students say that same thing about me.
4) How did your mentor influence your work in eighteenth-century studies, specifically? OR: What are some barriers, as you see it, to establishing positive mentorship relationships in higher education and/or eighteenth-century studies?
Early in my graduate program, I was applying for a fellowship to a Folger Shakespeare Library seminar. The personal statement required me to conceptualize a final dissertation project that was very much in its infancy at the time. Katie worked with me over the course of countless drafts and starts and stops. It was the most painful document I have ever created, and it ended up being one of my favorite articulations of what would become my dissertation project. What sticks with me the most when I think about this process is that Katie’s mother died during this period, yet she still found the time to shepherd me through this process. That fellowship kickstarted my own research and helped me find my place in the field.
My research is transoceanic in nature. I study narratives by and about sailors as a nexus between literature and reform movements in the 18th century. In order to make this work as a dissertation project, my committee consisted of advisors in British and American literature. This required a great deal of flexibility on behalf of faculty members. I could not have done it, if Katie hadn’t been willing to help me think outside the box in creating a project and then finding a committee who would support that project.
As Director of Graduate studies, Katie was instrumental in helping develop training opportunities for alternative career plans outside of academia for students. It was at her suggestion that I got involved helping with social media for the Women’s Caucus!
We all know how bad the academic job market is, and there is increasing pressure to rethink graduate studies as a result. One of the toughest roles for mentees of graduate students and early career scholars right now is helping them navigate this reality. Katie was realistic in acknowledging what this market looks like and in helping support skills that made students competitive both within and outside the academy. It is these outside skills that made me a more competitive applicant for teaching jobs. Just as importantly, however, I felt that Katie would support any decision that I made in my future career. I never felt pressure to find an academic job (or to only look at academic jobs), which I am grateful for. We need more mentors like her who are willing to do this kind of work.
5) As you continue in your own career as a scholar, what did you glean from your mentor that will guide your approach with your own students?
Academia can be an isolating place for graduate students and early career faculty, especially as you navigate your own teaching for the first time and you move away from the comfort of your
graduate program. One way to help with this is strong mentorship connections between established faculty and early career scholars. As we start first jobs, it can feel professional support networks from graduate school disappear (coupled with the fact that geographic displacement changes personal networks). Beyond professional connections, personal connections are vital. Mentors who take an interest (and acknowledge) the lives of their mentees outside of research and teaching help build community for young scholars when they need it most.
When my son was born, one of the first gifts that we received was a box of books from Katie; many of which are his favorite bed time stories. Every time I read them to him, I am reminded how lucky I am to have done graduate school under the guidance of a strong female mentor, and how grateful I am for this. I seek to be the same to my own graduate students, as they attempt to balance the demands of scholarship, teaching, and personal lives outside the classroom. Rather than ignoring those personal lives, I hope to be a voice who helps them navigate the complexities of these competing interests and be a support for important life events that occur in and outside of the classroom.
On a surface level, I also respond to emails far more quickly than I otherwise would have and work to match the level of feedback that I received from Katie, as I know how comforting that is on the other side of it! This may be the most important mentorship lesson that Katie taught me.
Katie on mentorship:
1. Identify three points in a graduate student's career when an advisor's/mentor's support is particularly important.
a. Just after the student's qualifying exams, there's a really crucial stock-taking that occurs, when students think back through everything they've read over the past months and start to draw connections, locate their true interests, and identify through-lines. Exam preparation itself is often fairly solitary, but this is the moment when a conversation can do so much.
b. I think many people would deem the first chapter of the dissertation to be the most fundamental one, or the intro/conclusion. But to me it seems like it's midway through the dissertation-writing process that's crucial: this is when students really start to figure out what the dissertation is about, and where it needs to go.
c. Another moment when mentorship is helpful, though perhaps not for the reasons we think of first, is at the Job-Market stage. Increasingly, I hope, we're coming to recognize that our conversations around post-PhD job options can't just be about what's the "best" job; we also have to address quality of life, institutional culture, community, family, and so on. I've had more than one conversation with female students in particular about how the sometimes circuitous route from post-doc to VAP to etc. intersects (or not) with one's ability to become a parent.
2. Specific steps I take as a mentor:
To me, some of the most helpful feedback an advisor can give, from early on, is around the larger intellectual stakes of a student's work. I suppose it's really less about feedback than about asking questions: OK, this is a great reading of this scene / stanza / etc., but what's the bigger picture? Helping students to articulate that is one of the most important (and enjoyable) roles that I think an advisor takes on.
3. What is one memorable aspect of your time working with Lisa?
One of the most memorable aspects of my time working with Lisa, truly, was how much she did without any help at all from me! She successfully applied for a grant to take a seminar at the Folger Library; she was selected to teach a course through the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies here at the University of Rochester; she received a Dissertation Prospectus Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council ... It was all totally amazing and had pretty much nothing to do with me.
4. How do I balance research and advising—any advice?
Ha. No advice; but I guess I'd just say I appreciate the way that advising graduate students forces you to read things you'd never have read otherwise. This doesn't advance my own research per se, but it helps me continue to broaden my knowledge of the long eighteenth century.
5. What is your current research focus?
I'm close (I hope) to finishing a book on Restoration drama and the rise of an eighteenth-century English canon in print.
Restoration dramatists were writing, of course, in the wake of a twenty-year period during which plays were widely reprinted and read, but not performed. My book considers how this lopsided access to drama affected how plays were written once the theatres reopened.
Specifically I argue that Restoration playwrights were uniquely aware of drama's "neither/nor" status as an artform that straddles page and stage, and that they leveraged this doubleness in their own plays in order to question print-centric notions of canonicity and "high" literary culture that had begun to emerge in the Interregnum years.
Ula Klein
1. How has the pandemic changed your research agenda or writing process, if at all?
My next project is meant to be on the idea of queer tourism, and I had a lot of travel planned that I wanted to do for the project, but that’s had to be put on hold, clearly! Aside from that, though, I also had a baby in the middle of the pandemic, so my son’s arrival paired with the pandemic has really forced me to think about how I allocate my time. I’m much more protective of my time now, and I’ve had to say “no” to several invitations for work not directly related to my personal projects.
2. Any recent developments/publications/interests/pets you would like us to publicize?
My book Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century Literature is out now (UVA Press, 2021). It’s my first book, and I am incredibly proud that it’s out in print now. I also have a chapter in Misty Kreuger’s edited volume Transatlantic Women Travelers 1688-1843 on female pirates and an article out with SEL entitled “Fanny Price as Disabled Heroine in Mansfield Park.”
3. How can institutions change orientation sessions in 2021 to help new students and faculty acclimate to their new school, college, or university from afar/remotely?
Having started a new job during the pandemic, I think that online sessions are important for helping faculty acclimate—including “fun” sessions like happy hours with breakout sessions on Zoom or similar video platforms. HR orientations should be offered frequently especially in July and August before the semester starts. Additionally, it is really helpful if the department receiving the new hire has individuals reach out to them and either have a virtual chat or else invite them out for a socially distanced hangout, weather permitting. It can be very lonely starting a new job in a pandemic!
4. What have you seen as effective in terms of how scholars use social media? In terms of how scholars remain productive in challenging times?
I enjoy having those connections on social media in between conferences. I think to really make effective use of social media especially on, for example, Twitter, it’s important for scholars to make connections with non-academics who work in their field of study. I follow Regency romance and historical fiction authors, museum curators, tour guides and costumers who specialize in eighteenth-century clothing because many of these people have done research into the material culture of the eighteenth century. Sometimes I’ve managed to find sources and information through those channels rather than through scholarly ones.
5. Any advice on prioritizing work objectives, or declining professional requests/ "saying no”?
My best advice is to always think: what will be the payoff and will I enjoy it? In our productivity-centered world, we tend to focus on output at the expense of pure enjoyment. Additionally, our society often pressures women to take on various kinds of service and to downplay our use of our own time. I’m trying to undo some of that thinking by prioritizing projects that I want to write, and to say no to anything that is not either directly related to those projects or which I would not enjoy. I still do service to the profession, but I try to say yes when it matters and when the timing is right for me.
6. Any suggestions for what the Women’s Caucus and its members can do to support adjuncts/instructors/junior faculty/independent scholars/K-12 teachers (take your pick)--both as an organization and as individuals?
Protecting vulnerable individuals at the ASECS annual meeting and also making them feel welcome is so important! Inviting them to lunch or dinner (and paying for them), including them in your circle at reception, introducing them to other scholars…these are seemingly small things that can make a difference in cultivating the next generation of scholars. Beyond that, I think that the NTT Fund is a good start, but I’d like to see ASECS be even more accessible. The Caucus might consider how to make ASECS membership and the conference fee free for adjuncts and contingent faculty and to expand the travel funds to the conference for such individuals. Equally important is a conversation about how to make it possible in the future to attend ASECS digitally for scholars who are unable to attend physically.
1. How has the pandemic changed your research agenda or writing process, if at all?
My next project is meant to be on the idea of queer tourism, and I had a lot of travel planned that I wanted to do for the project, but that’s had to be put on hold, clearly! Aside from that, though, I also had a baby in the middle of the pandemic, so my son’s arrival paired with the pandemic has really forced me to think about how I allocate my time. I’m much more protective of my time now, and I’ve had to say “no” to several invitations for work not directly related to my personal projects.
2. Any recent developments/publications/interests/pets you would like us to publicize?
My book Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century Literature is out now (UVA Press, 2021). It’s my first book, and I am incredibly proud that it’s out in print now. I also have a chapter in Misty Kreuger’s edited volume Transatlantic Women Travelers 1688-1843 on female pirates and an article out with SEL entitled “Fanny Price as Disabled Heroine in Mansfield Park.”
3. How can institutions change orientation sessions in 2021 to help new students and faculty acclimate to their new school, college, or university from afar/remotely?
Having started a new job during the pandemic, I think that online sessions are important for helping faculty acclimate—including “fun” sessions like happy hours with breakout sessions on Zoom or similar video platforms. HR orientations should be offered frequently especially in July and August before the semester starts. Additionally, it is really helpful if the department receiving the new hire has individuals reach out to them and either have a virtual chat or else invite them out for a socially distanced hangout, weather permitting. It can be very lonely starting a new job in a pandemic!
4. What have you seen as effective in terms of how scholars use social media? In terms of how scholars remain productive in challenging times?
I enjoy having those connections on social media in between conferences. I think to really make effective use of social media especially on, for example, Twitter, it’s important for scholars to make connections with non-academics who work in their field of study. I follow Regency romance and historical fiction authors, museum curators, tour guides and costumers who specialize in eighteenth-century clothing because many of these people have done research into the material culture of the eighteenth century. Sometimes I’ve managed to find sources and information through those channels rather than through scholarly ones.
5. Any advice on prioritizing work objectives, or declining professional requests/ "saying no”?
My best advice is to always think: what will be the payoff and will I enjoy it? In our productivity-centered world, we tend to focus on output at the expense of pure enjoyment. Additionally, our society often pressures women to take on various kinds of service and to downplay our use of our own time. I’m trying to undo some of that thinking by prioritizing projects that I want to write, and to say no to anything that is not either directly related to those projects or which I would not enjoy. I still do service to the profession, but I try to say yes when it matters and when the timing is right for me.
6. Any suggestions for what the Women’s Caucus and its members can do to support adjuncts/instructors/junior faculty/independent scholars/K-12 teachers (take your pick)--both as an organization and as individuals?
Protecting vulnerable individuals at the ASECS annual meeting and also making them feel welcome is so important! Inviting them to lunch or dinner (and paying for them), including them in your circle at reception, introducing them to other scholars…these are seemingly small things that can make a difference in cultivating the next generation of scholars. Beyond that, I think that the NTT Fund is a good start, but I’d like to see ASECS be even more accessible. The Caucus might consider how to make ASECS membership and the conference fee free for adjuncts and contingent faculty and to expand the travel funds to the conference for such individuals. Equally important is a conversation about how to make it possible in the future to attend ASECS digitally for scholars who are unable to attend physically.
Member of the Month: Leigh-Michil George
1) How has the pandemic changed your research agenda or writing process, if at all?
Although it can be challenging to find time for research and scholarly writing as a high school English teacher, I’ve been able to continue my research agenda since I have access to digital resources (e.g. ECCO, HathiTrust) through my school’s affiliation with UCLA and its library system. The summer before the pandemic I was fortunate to receive a fellowship through the Huntington Library that provided me with the financial support to pursue archival research in the UK. This means that I have the articles, books, and digital copies of archival material I need to move forward with my research. Also, before the pandemic I had a super commute to UCLA (approx. 3-4 hours every weekday), but since I am now teaching remotely I no longer have that commute which has given me more time to write in the mornings. Typically, I might leave for work around 5:30 am or 6:00 am. Now I can spend an hour (or two!) writing at my desk, the kitchen table, or in my bed, instead of sitting behind the wheel of a car or squeezing into a seat on a bus or a vanpool, making my slow, winding way on the 405 (which turns out to not be the worst--I checked--freeway for LA commuters, but it’s pretty close). Most importantly, in terms of continuing with my research and writing, I (and my family members) have been safe and well through the pandemic.
2) Any recent developments/publications/interests/pets you would like us to publicize?
My book project on sentimental laughter, caricature, and jestbooks in the late Georgian period has pivoted. The book now has a greater focus on Jane Austen’s jokes, found in her novels, letters, and juvenilia. The inspiration for the book is the notorious passage in Persuasion about the “large fat sighings” of Mrs. Musgrove. In fall 2019, I tried to teach Persuasion to ninth graders--it didn’t go the way I intended (though my students did produce some funny spoofs in the spirit of Austen’s own teenage writing “The Beautifull Cassandra”)--but it helped me reassess what I’ve learned about Austen’s fiction over the years. I love the response the novelist gives to James Stanier Clarke in an April 1, 1816 letter: “I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter. — No — I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way.” Why is humor so indispensable to Austen’s style? How does laughter function as a source of independence and self-knowledge? These questions are on my mind, as well as many more that explore the relationship between laughter and sensibility. Pivoting the project to Jane Austen has been enjoyable, but it is also daunting. There is a lot of new scholarship I’m catching up on, like Jane Austen and Comedy (2019) edited by Erin Goss, as well as classics, like Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975). Of course, the list of impressive, illuminating books on Jane Austen goes on and on. My hope is to add to that beautiful, exhilarating, contentious (in a good way) conversation.
3) How can institutions change orientation sessions in 2021 to help new students and faculty acclimate to their new school, college, or university from afar/remotely?
Since the secondary school I teach at, Geffen Academy, is affiliated with UCLA, I often think about the connections between secondary and post-secondary learning experiences. However, I’m not sure how to best answer this question because of the difference between teaching children vs. adults. I see my students in class via Zoom multiple times each week, and I may also see them at clubs that I advise or during office hours. Additionally, the school has community time events and recreational activities for students. There is a significant amount of time dedicated to community building on a weekly basis. Still, I assume it must be difficult for new students to get their bearings in a remote learning environment. I’m glad that the school provides Educator Liaisons and offers workshops to help new students. However, all these resources are provided via Zoom. And Zoom fatigue is real.
4) What have you seen as effective in terms of how scholars use social media? In terms of how scholars remain productive in challenging times?
Social media and I don’t know one another very well. It’s been a good couple years since I’ve been on Facebook. And I’ve never managed to make it on to Instagram. But I do check out other scholars’ tweets from time to time, and it often results in me smiling, laughing, going “Ahhh!,'' or becoming sad and indignant about contingency. On another note, I would like to sing the praises of Sarah Kareem and Crystal Lake’s website The Rambling: https://the-rambling.com/. In 2018, I published an essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me in the Long 18th C” (https://the-rambling.com/2018/10/18/how-it-feels-to-be-colored-me-in-the-long-18th-c/) and I continue to be grateful for that opportunity. There is great writing on the site for eighteenth-centuryists and everyone else. Here are two essays to check out: “William Hay; Or, An Obsession” (https://the-rambling.com/2019/02/14/valentines-lau/) by Travis Chi Wing Lau and “Outlander: Making Scotland Great Again?” (https://the-rambling.com/2018/07/16/outlander-making-scotland-great-again/) by Angelina Del Balzo.
5) Any advice on prioritizing work objectives, or declining professional requests/ "saying no”?
Just say “No.” “Not gonna do it.” “Nope.” Or an oldie, but a goodie: “Thank you, but I am politely declining…” Ultimately, I’m a big believer in self-care. That is, I am vigilant about my physical, mental, and emotional health. When your health is at stake because you are overcommitted--which has happened to me in the past--you may eventually find the strength and sense to say “No” in order to survive. At least, that has been my journey. Plus, I’ve come to realize that if I prioritize my own wellbeing it makes me so much more effective at supporting others. Along my journey, I’ve been encouraged by the wisdom of women scholars, including a brilliant senior scholar who once advised--what has now become a top ten mantra--“Let It Go” (yes, the phrase is inspired by the Disney movie Frozen, which I still haven’t seen). Additionally, I’ve gained helpful insights from reading a wide range of books, more than I can keep track of, about the challenges of work-life balance. Here are some titles I recommend: The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure--Without Losing Your Soul by Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy, The Coach’s Guide for Women Professors Who Want a Successful Career and a Well-Balanced Life by Rena Seltzer, Making Work Work for the Highly Sensitive Person by Barrie Jaeger, and The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Ray Bennett. Plus, an all-time favorite (especially as an audiobook) is Drop the Ball: Achieving More By Doing Less by Tiffany Dufu. That book added another mantra to my repertoire: “Delegate with Joy.”
6) Any suggestions for what the Women’s Caucus and its members can do to support adjuncts/instructors/junior faculty/independent scholars/K-12 teachers (take your pick)--both as an organization and as individuals?
I’m grateful that I have been supported intellectually, financially, and in so many other ways throughout my academic career, as a graduate student then as a community college professor and now as a high school English teacher. I wouldn’t be part of ASECS or the Women’s Caucus or writing a book about Jane Austen’s jokes if not for the mentors who advised me and encouraged me to finish my dissertation when I felt like giving up when I was anxious during a family crisis and grieving after a miscarriage. I wouldn’t have had the opportunities to present at conferences or travel for research if not for the institutional support I’ve received. All that support has shaped my life in wonderful, positive ways--a life that is drawn to learning more and more about the eighteenth century. And yet, this past summer I thought of stepping away from my identity as an eighteenth-centuryist. I was an exhausted and ashamed black woman. Since May 2020, many articles have been written about black fatigue and exhaustion. However, I have not come across as many articles about the guilt part of the exhaustion--when you feel like you haven’t done enough or spoken up enough, when you feel like you are sustaining, instead of resisting racism, when you feel saddened and angered by the thought that you haven’t made it any better for the “young, gifted, and black” students you want to support. I don’t think of myself as someone who code-switches, and yet this past summer I felt compelled to face the ways I modify my behaviour or stay silent because I am a black body moving in spaces that are predominantly white, including ASECS conferences (There are notable exceptions to this feeling of otherness, like the ASECS 2019 Presidential Workshop “Teaching Race in the Eighteenth Century in the Twenty-First Century Classroom,” co-chaired by Christy Pichichero and Regulus Allen). Much of my life has been spent moving through spaces where a guessing game is going on in the back of my mind. Is this another space where I’ll be told--as I have many times before--that race doesn’t matter? For me, as a black woman, my race and my gender matter and they are intertwined. So, what can the Women’s Caucus do? Could we start an affinity group for women of color? Could there be a White Anti-Racist affinity group? If these are already happening or in the works, please get the word out.
1) How has the pandemic changed your research agenda or writing process, if at all?
Although it can be challenging to find time for research and scholarly writing as a high school English teacher, I’ve been able to continue my research agenda since I have access to digital resources (e.g. ECCO, HathiTrust) through my school’s affiliation with UCLA and its library system. The summer before the pandemic I was fortunate to receive a fellowship through the Huntington Library that provided me with the financial support to pursue archival research in the UK. This means that I have the articles, books, and digital copies of archival material I need to move forward with my research. Also, before the pandemic I had a super commute to UCLA (approx. 3-4 hours every weekday), but since I am now teaching remotely I no longer have that commute which has given me more time to write in the mornings. Typically, I might leave for work around 5:30 am or 6:00 am. Now I can spend an hour (or two!) writing at my desk, the kitchen table, or in my bed, instead of sitting behind the wheel of a car or squeezing into a seat on a bus or a vanpool, making my slow, winding way on the 405 (which turns out to not be the worst--I checked--freeway for LA commuters, but it’s pretty close). Most importantly, in terms of continuing with my research and writing, I (and my family members) have been safe and well through the pandemic.
2) Any recent developments/publications/interests/pets you would like us to publicize?
My book project on sentimental laughter, caricature, and jestbooks in the late Georgian period has pivoted. The book now has a greater focus on Jane Austen’s jokes, found in her novels, letters, and juvenilia. The inspiration for the book is the notorious passage in Persuasion about the “large fat sighings” of Mrs. Musgrove. In fall 2019, I tried to teach Persuasion to ninth graders--it didn’t go the way I intended (though my students did produce some funny spoofs in the spirit of Austen’s own teenage writing “The Beautifull Cassandra”)--but it helped me reassess what I’ve learned about Austen’s fiction over the years. I love the response the novelist gives to James Stanier Clarke in an April 1, 1816 letter: “I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter. — No — I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way.” Why is humor so indispensable to Austen’s style? How does laughter function as a source of independence and self-knowledge? These questions are on my mind, as well as many more that explore the relationship between laughter and sensibility. Pivoting the project to Jane Austen has been enjoyable, but it is also daunting. There is a lot of new scholarship I’m catching up on, like Jane Austen and Comedy (2019) edited by Erin Goss, as well as classics, like Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975). Of course, the list of impressive, illuminating books on Jane Austen goes on and on. My hope is to add to that beautiful, exhilarating, contentious (in a good way) conversation.
3) How can institutions change orientation sessions in 2021 to help new students and faculty acclimate to their new school, college, or university from afar/remotely?
Since the secondary school I teach at, Geffen Academy, is affiliated with UCLA, I often think about the connections between secondary and post-secondary learning experiences. However, I’m not sure how to best answer this question because of the difference between teaching children vs. adults. I see my students in class via Zoom multiple times each week, and I may also see them at clubs that I advise or during office hours. Additionally, the school has community time events and recreational activities for students. There is a significant amount of time dedicated to community building on a weekly basis. Still, I assume it must be difficult for new students to get their bearings in a remote learning environment. I’m glad that the school provides Educator Liaisons and offers workshops to help new students. However, all these resources are provided via Zoom. And Zoom fatigue is real.
4) What have you seen as effective in terms of how scholars use social media? In terms of how scholars remain productive in challenging times?
Social media and I don’t know one another very well. It’s been a good couple years since I’ve been on Facebook. And I’ve never managed to make it on to Instagram. But I do check out other scholars’ tweets from time to time, and it often results in me smiling, laughing, going “Ahhh!,'' or becoming sad and indignant about contingency. On another note, I would like to sing the praises of Sarah Kareem and Crystal Lake’s website The Rambling: https://the-rambling.com/. In 2018, I published an essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me in the Long 18th C” (https://the-rambling.com/2018/10/18/how-it-feels-to-be-colored-me-in-the-long-18th-c/) and I continue to be grateful for that opportunity. There is great writing on the site for eighteenth-centuryists and everyone else. Here are two essays to check out: “William Hay; Or, An Obsession” (https://the-rambling.com/2019/02/14/valentines-lau/) by Travis Chi Wing Lau and “Outlander: Making Scotland Great Again?” (https://the-rambling.com/2018/07/16/outlander-making-scotland-great-again/) by Angelina Del Balzo.
5) Any advice on prioritizing work objectives, or declining professional requests/ "saying no”?
Just say “No.” “Not gonna do it.” “Nope.” Or an oldie, but a goodie: “Thank you, but I am politely declining…” Ultimately, I’m a big believer in self-care. That is, I am vigilant about my physical, mental, and emotional health. When your health is at stake because you are overcommitted--which has happened to me in the past--you may eventually find the strength and sense to say “No” in order to survive. At least, that has been my journey. Plus, I’ve come to realize that if I prioritize my own wellbeing it makes me so much more effective at supporting others. Along my journey, I’ve been encouraged by the wisdom of women scholars, including a brilliant senior scholar who once advised--what has now become a top ten mantra--“Let It Go” (yes, the phrase is inspired by the Disney movie Frozen, which I still haven’t seen). Additionally, I’ve gained helpful insights from reading a wide range of books, more than I can keep track of, about the challenges of work-life balance. Here are some titles I recommend: The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure--Without Losing Your Soul by Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy, The Coach’s Guide for Women Professors Who Want a Successful Career and a Well-Balanced Life by Rena Seltzer, Making Work Work for the Highly Sensitive Person by Barrie Jaeger, and The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Ray Bennett. Plus, an all-time favorite (especially as an audiobook) is Drop the Ball: Achieving More By Doing Less by Tiffany Dufu. That book added another mantra to my repertoire: “Delegate with Joy.”
6) Any suggestions for what the Women’s Caucus and its members can do to support adjuncts/instructors/junior faculty/independent scholars/K-12 teachers (take your pick)--both as an organization and as individuals?
I’m grateful that I have been supported intellectually, financially, and in so many other ways throughout my academic career, as a graduate student then as a community college professor and now as a high school English teacher. I wouldn’t be part of ASECS or the Women’s Caucus or writing a book about Jane Austen’s jokes if not for the mentors who advised me and encouraged me to finish my dissertation when I felt like giving up when I was anxious during a family crisis and grieving after a miscarriage. I wouldn’t have had the opportunities to present at conferences or travel for research if not for the institutional support I’ve received. All that support has shaped my life in wonderful, positive ways--a life that is drawn to learning more and more about the eighteenth century. And yet, this past summer I thought of stepping away from my identity as an eighteenth-centuryist. I was an exhausted and ashamed black woman. Since May 2020, many articles have been written about black fatigue and exhaustion. However, I have not come across as many articles about the guilt part of the exhaustion--when you feel like you haven’t done enough or spoken up enough, when you feel like you are sustaining, instead of resisting racism, when you feel saddened and angered by the thought that you haven’t made it any better for the “young, gifted, and black” students you want to support. I don’t think of myself as someone who code-switches, and yet this past summer I felt compelled to face the ways I modify my behaviour or stay silent because I am a black body moving in spaces that are predominantly white, including ASECS conferences (There are notable exceptions to this feeling of otherness, like the ASECS 2019 Presidential Workshop “Teaching Race in the Eighteenth Century in the Twenty-First Century Classroom,” co-chaired by Christy Pichichero and Regulus Allen). Much of my life has been spent moving through spaces where a guessing game is going on in the back of my mind. Is this another space where I’ll be told--as I have many times before--that race doesn’t matter? For me, as a black woman, my race and my gender matter and they are intertwined. So, what can the Women’s Caucus do? Could we start an affinity group for women of color? Could there be a White Anti-Racist affinity group? If these are already happening or in the works, please get the word out.
Member of the Month: Dr. Misty Krueger
How has the pandemic changed your research agenda or writing process, if at all?
Because of the pandemic I have been sheltering in place since March 2020, and I have spent a lot of that time shifting my teaching online and honing my Zoom pedagogy. This shift inspired me to give a talk at the Southeastern American Eighteenth-Century Society conference (also on Zoom) about what I’m calling “Zooming with Jane Austen.” The talk discusses the way I used Zoom to teach an Austen course and help foster online sociability. That course also inspired me to revise an essay I had written on digital pedagogy for a collection on reading Austen after the bicentenary of her death—in particular I added a section on Zoom pedagogy. The pandemic also inspired me to answer a call for papers from the Jane Austen Society of North America’s online journal, Persuasions On-Line, about Austen and the pandemic. I published an essay titled “The Austen Treatment: Turning to Austen in Times of Isolation,” and in the essay I examine some of the many internet articles that appeared during the pandemic that connected Austen to biblio- and cinematherapy. The pandemic clearly altered my research agenda, as it inspired me to tie my love of Austen to timely experiences and pedagogies spawned by social distancing and quarantining.
Any recent developments/publications/interests/pets you would like us to publicize?
I am excited to share that a collection of essays I edited is coming out this March. Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843, published by Bucknell University Press, features ten fantastic essays by women scholars from the U.S., Canada, and England, as well as an afterword by Eve Tavor Bannet and my introduction to the volume. The collection explores representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. Essays in the first part of the book cover figures such as Maria Sibylla Merian (Diana Epelbaum), Anna Maria Falconbridge (Shelby Johnson), Flora Tristan and Fanny Calderón de la Barca (Grace A. Gomashie), Newfoundland women (Pam Perkins), and Anne Bonny and Mary Read (Ula Lukszo Klein). In the latter half, essays focus on fictional women including characters in Emma Corbett (Jennifer Golightly), The Female American (Alexis McQuigge), Woman of Colour (Octavia Cox), Zelica the Creole (Victoria Barnett-Woods), and Oroonoko and Hartly House (Kathleen Morrissey). While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men’s travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic—some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. The essays address the fictional and the historical, national and geographic location, racial and ethnic identities, and the configuration of the transatlantic world as a space for women. This book was inspired by a class I designed six years ago and teach regularly, as well as an ASECS panel on transatlantic eighteenth-century women that I organized years ago on behalf of the Aphra Behn Society. I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to work with these amazing scholars, and I am excited about sharing these essays with both our scholarly community and students.
How can institutions change orientation sessions in 2021 to help new students and faculty acclimate to their new school, college, or university from afar/remotely?
Thanks to the pandemic, many of us have moved our entire lives online, so it should not come as a surprise that we will continue to inhabit this space in the year to come. As institutions think about ways to make new students and faculty feel welcome and eventually “at home,” they will need to draw on the technology that supports sociability, and they will need to keep in mind how video calls, for example, can be used effectively to encourage social interactions, but should not be overused. As long as people engage in video calls in creative ways (such as small group hangouts and happy hours, watch parties, and online games) and do not feel overwhelmed with Zoom call after Zoom call, this technology can go a long way in helping people feel connected. There are ways to get to know people, places, and institutions online other than a video call, though. Pre-recorded videos, text chat, engaging websites, and social media are instrumental in helping people feel connected at this time. Once students and faculty “arrive” at their new school, it is likely that they will feel more disconnected than in days—a feeling of personal contact has been dependent on face-to-face, in-person interactions. It is now more important than ever for people to actively commit to communicating with each other in small groups and to building a virtual community that is as welcoming as one you would find in person.
What have you seen as effective in terms of how scholars use social media? In terms of how scholars remain productive in challenging times?
In challenging times like these, scholars are using social media as sites of testimony and places of affirmation. Twitter and Facebook have been useful for providing scholars a space to be honest with each other about how difficult it has been in the pandemic to juggle “all the things!” New teaching modalities, new courses, children at home, spouse at home, lack of resources, works-in-progress, works to begin, works stalled…the list goes on. Social media has provided an outlet for people to share their experiences and
to support one another—whether they have known each other for years or just started following each other last week. This is affirmation. People are committed to being there for each other, and they find all kinds of ways to do this. For example, I am the admin for a Facebook teaching group and co-admin for a writing group. This is just one way I try to help people come together and find the support they need to make it through the day. I think it’s perfectly fine to redefine our productivity goals right now and not to compare ourselves in 2021 to who we were and what we were capable of doing at any other time in our lives. This acceptance of “being enough” has actually helped my productivity. I get done what I get done, and that’s enough. I encourage others to think about that, too. You are enough.
Any advice on prioritizing work objectives, or declining professional requests/ "saying no”?
Saying no has been one of the hardest things for me to do. I have been a hardcore yes person for over ten years—if someone asked me to join a committe, I would say yes. Fill in for someone on sabbatical? Yes. Give a talk? Yes. Write a chapter for someone’s collection? Yes. In 2018 when I was diagnosed with cancer and went through a grueling year of treatment, I had to learn how to say no, not because I wanted to, but because my body told me I had to. In my recovery, I have embraced the power of “no.” I now prioritize the things I want to do. To paraphrase Yoda, there is no I “have” or “need” to do, only want to do. I ask myself, is this right for me? Will accepting that request help me achieve my goals in a way that feels healthy right now? Will giving my time to something (say, at work) be good for me now—not just in the long run. The long run for far too long has been the reason I could never say no. Now I feel that I’m finally in a position to say no and to value the present as much as the future. That is my wish for all of us.
Any suggestions for what the Women’s Caucus and its members can do to support adjuncts/instructors/junior faculty/independent scholars/K-12 teachers (take your pick)--both as an organization and as individuals?
In the past twenty years I have been a graduate student (twice), an adjunct, a non-tenure-track lecturer, a visiting assistant professor, a non-tenure track assistant professor, a tenure-track assistant professor, and now finally a faculty member in the last stage of my tenure application process. I know how hard it is to feel like everything you have hoped for and worked so hard for may not be realized as you imagined. It was difficult to face my colleagues at conferences for many years because I dreaded that feeling of people asking me “what’s next?” and knowing that I could only say, “I don’t
know, but I hope that….” The Women’s Caucus and its members can support contingent faculty, scholars, and teachers by recognizing that this space is full of people who don’t know what’s next, who have hope but also fear, and who are OK with not being on the tenure track or in a tenured position. The Caucus can normalize the many avenues that we tread and help the non-tenure track and untenured feel that this is an egalitarian space full of support. I know that members of the Caucus do that already, which is great, but as more graduate students, adjuncts, instructors, and junior faculty face the reality that the jobs won’t be there to begin with or are taken away, they will need to find a way to cope with the fallout. I think it would be great to have a group (without tenure track and tenured faculty present) in the Caucus that addresses the experiences of this population.
How has the pandemic changed your research agenda or writing process, if at all?
Because of the pandemic I have been sheltering in place since March 2020, and I have spent a lot of that time shifting my teaching online and honing my Zoom pedagogy. This shift inspired me to give a talk at the Southeastern American Eighteenth-Century Society conference (also on Zoom) about what I’m calling “Zooming with Jane Austen.” The talk discusses the way I used Zoom to teach an Austen course and help foster online sociability. That course also inspired me to revise an essay I had written on digital pedagogy for a collection on reading Austen after the bicentenary of her death—in particular I added a section on Zoom pedagogy. The pandemic also inspired me to answer a call for papers from the Jane Austen Society of North America’s online journal, Persuasions On-Line, about Austen and the pandemic. I published an essay titled “The Austen Treatment: Turning to Austen in Times of Isolation,” and in the essay I examine some of the many internet articles that appeared during the pandemic that connected Austen to biblio- and cinematherapy. The pandemic clearly altered my research agenda, as it inspired me to tie my love of Austen to timely experiences and pedagogies spawned by social distancing and quarantining.
Any recent developments/publications/interests/pets you would like us to publicize?
I am excited to share that a collection of essays I edited is coming out this March. Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843, published by Bucknell University Press, features ten fantastic essays by women scholars from the U.S., Canada, and England, as well as an afterword by Eve Tavor Bannet and my introduction to the volume. The collection explores representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. Essays in the first part of the book cover figures such as Maria Sibylla Merian (Diana Epelbaum), Anna Maria Falconbridge (Shelby Johnson), Flora Tristan and Fanny Calderón de la Barca (Grace A. Gomashie), Newfoundland women (Pam Perkins), and Anne Bonny and Mary Read (Ula Lukszo Klein). In the latter half, essays focus on fictional women including characters in Emma Corbett (Jennifer Golightly), The Female American (Alexis McQuigge), Woman of Colour (Octavia Cox), Zelica the Creole (Victoria Barnett-Woods), and Oroonoko and Hartly House (Kathleen Morrissey). While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men’s travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic—some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. The essays address the fictional and the historical, national and geographic location, racial and ethnic identities, and the configuration of the transatlantic world as a space for women. This book was inspired by a class I designed six years ago and teach regularly, as well as an ASECS panel on transatlantic eighteenth-century women that I organized years ago on behalf of the Aphra Behn Society. I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to work with these amazing scholars, and I am excited about sharing these essays with both our scholarly community and students.
How can institutions change orientation sessions in 2021 to help new students and faculty acclimate to their new school, college, or university from afar/remotely?
Thanks to the pandemic, many of us have moved our entire lives online, so it should not come as a surprise that we will continue to inhabit this space in the year to come. As institutions think about ways to make new students and faculty feel welcome and eventually “at home,” they will need to draw on the technology that supports sociability, and they will need to keep in mind how video calls, for example, can be used effectively to encourage social interactions, but should not be overused. As long as people engage in video calls in creative ways (such as small group hangouts and happy hours, watch parties, and online games) and do not feel overwhelmed with Zoom call after Zoom call, this technology can go a long way in helping people feel connected. There are ways to get to know people, places, and institutions online other than a video call, though. Pre-recorded videos, text chat, engaging websites, and social media are instrumental in helping people feel connected at this time. Once students and faculty “arrive” at their new school, it is likely that they will feel more disconnected than in days—a feeling of personal contact has been dependent on face-to-face, in-person interactions. It is now more important than ever for people to actively commit to communicating with each other in small groups and to building a virtual community that is as welcoming as one you would find in person.
What have you seen as effective in terms of how scholars use social media? In terms of how scholars remain productive in challenging times?
In challenging times like these, scholars are using social media as sites of testimony and places of affirmation. Twitter and Facebook have been useful for providing scholars a space to be honest with each other about how difficult it has been in the pandemic to juggle “all the things!” New teaching modalities, new courses, children at home, spouse at home, lack of resources, works-in-progress, works to begin, works stalled…the list goes on. Social media has provided an outlet for people to share their experiences and
to support one another—whether they have known each other for years or just started following each other last week. This is affirmation. People are committed to being there for each other, and they find all kinds of ways to do this. For example, I am the admin for a Facebook teaching group and co-admin for a writing group. This is just one way I try to help people come together and find the support they need to make it through the day. I think it’s perfectly fine to redefine our productivity goals right now and not to compare ourselves in 2021 to who we were and what we were capable of doing at any other time in our lives. This acceptance of “being enough” has actually helped my productivity. I get done what I get done, and that’s enough. I encourage others to think about that, too. You are enough.
Any advice on prioritizing work objectives, or declining professional requests/ "saying no”?
Saying no has been one of the hardest things for me to do. I have been a hardcore yes person for over ten years—if someone asked me to join a committe, I would say yes. Fill in for someone on sabbatical? Yes. Give a talk? Yes. Write a chapter for someone’s collection? Yes. In 2018 when I was diagnosed with cancer and went through a grueling year of treatment, I had to learn how to say no, not because I wanted to, but because my body told me I had to. In my recovery, I have embraced the power of “no.” I now prioritize the things I want to do. To paraphrase Yoda, there is no I “have” or “need” to do, only want to do. I ask myself, is this right for me? Will accepting that request help me achieve my goals in a way that feels healthy right now? Will giving my time to something (say, at work) be good for me now—not just in the long run. The long run for far too long has been the reason I could never say no. Now I feel that I’m finally in a position to say no and to value the present as much as the future. That is my wish for all of us.
Any suggestions for what the Women’s Caucus and its members can do to support adjuncts/instructors/junior faculty/independent scholars/K-12 teachers (take your pick)--both as an organization and as individuals?
In the past twenty years I have been a graduate student (twice), an adjunct, a non-tenure-track lecturer, a visiting assistant professor, a non-tenure track assistant professor, a tenure-track assistant professor, and now finally a faculty member in the last stage of my tenure application process. I know how hard it is to feel like everything you have hoped for and worked so hard for may not be realized as you imagined. It was difficult to face my colleagues at conferences for many years because I dreaded that feeling of people asking me “what’s next?” and knowing that I could only say, “I don’t
know, but I hope that….” The Women’s Caucus and its members can support contingent faculty, scholars, and teachers by recognizing that this space is full of people who don’t know what’s next, who have hope but also fear, and who are OK with not being on the tenure track or in a tenured position. The Caucus can normalize the many avenues that we tread and help the non-tenure track and untenured feel that this is an egalitarian space full of support. I know that members of the Caucus do that already, which is great, but as more graduate students, adjuncts, instructors, and junior faculty face the reality that the jobs won’t be there to begin with or are taken away, they will need to find a way to cope with the fallout. I think it would be great to have a group (without tenure track and tenured faculty present) in the Caucus that addresses the experiences of this population.
Member of the Month: Nora Nachumi
1. How has the pandemic changed your research agenda or writing process, if at all?
The pandemic has made me think carefully about how I move between work and the daily demands of my life. I live in a small apartment in Brooklyn with my partner, two cats and our son, a bright, verbal, loud teenaged boy who has autism and adhd. When the pandemic hit NYC in March, we suddenly all were working from home. Finding the physical and mental space for scholarship was challenging, to say the least. Luckily, however, I was already involved in co-editing two very different collections of essays, Making Stars: Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain with Kristina Straub, and Jane Austen: Sex, Romance and Representation with Stephanie Oppenheim. The deadlines for each project gave me a sense of structure and our commitments to our contributors gave me a reason to scrabble for space. However, I also had to change how I write. Before the pandemic, I thought I needed long, uninterrupted stretches of time in order to produce anything decent. Since March I have been working on being less of a perfectionist and have been working in shorter, more frequent chunks of time. So far the world hasn’t ended. In addition to two edited collections, I hope to finish a few short pieces over the next few months. I am also going to use the time to get my ducks in a row in preparation for a monograph I am hoping to write.
2. Any recent developments/publications/interests/pets you would like us to publicize?
Yes!! The two collections I mentioned are well-worth advertising. Making Stars (University of Delaware Press) is a collection of brilliant essays that explore the mutually constitutive relationship between eighteenth-century celebrity culture and the development of a what we think of as biography in the modern world. Our contributors explore the celebrity of diverse individuals – including theatrical performers, politicians, dead heroes, “it girls,” wronged wives, criminals, vagrants and a rhinoceros – and, in doing so, show us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that is mediated and remediated across multiple sites with varied and sometimes contradictory effects. Separately and together, the essays in Making Stars demonstrate how the phenomenon of celebrity shatters the linear narrative of biography into multiple sightings across different media platforms. They also demonstrate that eighteenth-century celebrity culture, in Britain, is more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than we had previously supposed.
Jane Austen: Sex, Romance and Representation (University of Rochester Press) brings together academic and creative perspectives in order to confront the conflicting ways we talk—or avoid talking—about sex and romance in Austen. In doing so, the collection zeroes in, not just on the erotics of Austen’s novels, but on the discourse that surrounds this divisive topic. Contributors to this collection include fiction writers, journalists, scholars, filmmakers, fans, book lovers and denizens of the internet. The pieces in this collection are generically diverse. Our contributors write about Austen in the ways that are appropriate to their experience and perspectives. By enabling this dynamic exchange, Jane Austen blurs the boundaries between academic and popular culture in order to see what we can learn from one another about Austen and ourselves.
What else? I recently taught a fantastic course on detective fiction and I relax by coloring in the Swear Word coloring book (thank you Sharon Harrow).
3. How can institutions change orientation sessions in 2021 to help new students and faculty acclimate to their new school, college, or university from afar/remotely?
I’m freestyling here but . . . I would point out the difference between translation and adaptation – rather than moving established components of the orientation experience online, it might be worth thinking about what the internet does well and then consider how to create an experience to meet particular goals. It might also be useful to do some research into how certain companies have translated live experiences to experiences online. For example, when my son turned 14, we found a company that did live-camera escape rooms; it was a great team-building experience and loads of fun.
4. What have you seen as effective in terms of how scholars use social media? In terms of how scholars remain productive in challenging times?
Two very different Facebook groups spring to mind. The first is the Eighteenth-Century Questions Quick Link which has been a fantastic resource for me (and probably most of you reading this newsletter). I have been especially impressed by people’s willingness to loan books, send pdfs and locate citations given the impact of Covid on research libraries and travel.
A few years ago Tita Chico founded a group called Las Titas, as a place to discuss writing, research and the vicissitudes of scholarly life. For many of us – whether junior, senior or in-between – the group became a safe haven, a place to ask questions and for advice, to be vulnerable, to celebrate and to give and receive support for our work. Recently Tita stepped back, new admins took over and the group was renamed The Writer’s Salon. The group is closed but available (to join request membership). Current members continue to use it as it serves them best. Some write regularly in a live writing room. Others ask for or volunteer as readers and share information. Some former members have moved on to a new group on Discord. It sounds fantastic but I haven’t given it a try; my son uses Discord and – to echo V. Woolf – I need a platform of my own in order to write.
5. Any advice on prioritizing work objectives, or declining professional requests/ "saying no”?
Life happens and, in my case, it has occasionally derailed my ability to meet deadlines. So I recommend realism. Decide what projects are most important to you and time them out. As for the rest, commit to slightly less than you think you can do and then do it on time (NB: in my case all this is aspirational).
6)Any suggestions for what the Women’s Caucus and its members can do to support adjuncts/instructors/junior faculty/independent scholars/K-12 teachers (take your pick)--both as an organization and as individuals?
Outreach, outreach, outreach. I have lots of ideas – including co-chairing, co-writing and co-editing work. Most importantly, however, we should continue to ask members of those groups what kind of support would be most valuable to them.
1. How has the pandemic changed your research agenda or writing process, if at all?
The pandemic has made me think carefully about how I move between work and the daily demands of my life. I live in a small apartment in Brooklyn with my partner, two cats and our son, a bright, verbal, loud teenaged boy who has autism and adhd. When the pandemic hit NYC in March, we suddenly all were working from home. Finding the physical and mental space for scholarship was challenging, to say the least. Luckily, however, I was already involved in co-editing two very different collections of essays, Making Stars: Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain with Kristina Straub, and Jane Austen: Sex, Romance and Representation with Stephanie Oppenheim. The deadlines for each project gave me a sense of structure and our commitments to our contributors gave me a reason to scrabble for space. However, I also had to change how I write. Before the pandemic, I thought I needed long, uninterrupted stretches of time in order to produce anything decent. Since March I have been working on being less of a perfectionist and have been working in shorter, more frequent chunks of time. So far the world hasn’t ended. In addition to two edited collections, I hope to finish a few short pieces over the next few months. I am also going to use the time to get my ducks in a row in preparation for a monograph I am hoping to write.
2. Any recent developments/publications/interests/pets you would like us to publicize?
Yes!! The two collections I mentioned are well-worth advertising. Making Stars (University of Delaware Press) is a collection of brilliant essays that explore the mutually constitutive relationship between eighteenth-century celebrity culture and the development of a what we think of as biography in the modern world. Our contributors explore the celebrity of diverse individuals – including theatrical performers, politicians, dead heroes, “it girls,” wronged wives, criminals, vagrants and a rhinoceros – and, in doing so, show us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that is mediated and remediated across multiple sites with varied and sometimes contradictory effects. Separately and together, the essays in Making Stars demonstrate how the phenomenon of celebrity shatters the linear narrative of biography into multiple sightings across different media platforms. They also demonstrate that eighteenth-century celebrity culture, in Britain, is more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than we had previously supposed.
Jane Austen: Sex, Romance and Representation (University of Rochester Press) brings together academic and creative perspectives in order to confront the conflicting ways we talk—or avoid talking—about sex and romance in Austen. In doing so, the collection zeroes in, not just on the erotics of Austen’s novels, but on the discourse that surrounds this divisive topic. Contributors to this collection include fiction writers, journalists, scholars, filmmakers, fans, book lovers and denizens of the internet. The pieces in this collection are generically diverse. Our contributors write about Austen in the ways that are appropriate to their experience and perspectives. By enabling this dynamic exchange, Jane Austen blurs the boundaries between academic and popular culture in order to see what we can learn from one another about Austen and ourselves.
What else? I recently taught a fantastic course on detective fiction and I relax by coloring in the Swear Word coloring book (thank you Sharon Harrow).
3. How can institutions change orientation sessions in 2021 to help new students and faculty acclimate to their new school, college, or university from afar/remotely?
I’m freestyling here but . . . I would point out the difference between translation and adaptation – rather than moving established components of the orientation experience online, it might be worth thinking about what the internet does well and then consider how to create an experience to meet particular goals. It might also be useful to do some research into how certain companies have translated live experiences to experiences online. For example, when my son turned 14, we found a company that did live-camera escape rooms; it was a great team-building experience and loads of fun.
4. What have you seen as effective in terms of how scholars use social media? In terms of how scholars remain productive in challenging times?
Two very different Facebook groups spring to mind. The first is the Eighteenth-Century Questions Quick Link which has been a fantastic resource for me (and probably most of you reading this newsletter). I have been especially impressed by people’s willingness to loan books, send pdfs and locate citations given the impact of Covid on research libraries and travel.
A few years ago Tita Chico founded a group called Las Titas, as a place to discuss writing, research and the vicissitudes of scholarly life. For many of us – whether junior, senior or in-between – the group became a safe haven, a place to ask questions and for advice, to be vulnerable, to celebrate and to give and receive support for our work. Recently Tita stepped back, new admins took over and the group was renamed The Writer’s Salon. The group is closed but available (to join request membership). Current members continue to use it as it serves them best. Some write regularly in a live writing room. Others ask for or volunteer as readers and share information. Some former members have moved on to a new group on Discord. It sounds fantastic but I haven’t given it a try; my son uses Discord and – to echo V. Woolf – I need a platform of my own in order to write.
5. Any advice on prioritizing work objectives, or declining professional requests/ "saying no”?
Life happens and, in my case, it has occasionally derailed my ability to meet deadlines. So I recommend realism. Decide what projects are most important to you and time them out. As for the rest, commit to slightly less than you think you can do and then do it on time (NB: in my case all this is aspirational).
6)Any suggestions for what the Women’s Caucus and its members can do to support adjuncts/instructors/junior faculty/independent scholars/K-12 teachers (take your pick)--both as an organization and as individuals?
Outreach, outreach, outreach. I have lots of ideas – including co-chairing, co-writing and co-editing work. Most importantly, however, we should continue to ask members of those groups what kind of support would be most valuable to them.
Member of the Month: Christy Pichichero
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I would say that eighteenth-century studies pursued me until I couldn’t escape it! Eighteenth-century studies first snuck into my life by way of classical music and art history during my undergraduate years at Princeton. I was a budding classical vocalist and student of comparative literature, focused on nineteenth-century French and Italian poetry. These interests came together while I was learning the French art song repertoire, in particular Claude Debussy’s settings of Paul Verlaine’s fêtes galantes poems. A hopeless nerd, instead of socializing during the fall of my senior year I spent my time researching these songs and poems and discovered that the latter were inspired by paintings by Antoine Watteau dating to the early eighteenth-century. I was enchanted by Watteau’s ethereal aesthetics and sought to learn more about the historical phenomenon of the fêtes galantes: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century garden parties wherein French aristocrats (decked out in formal garb, of course) picnicked, lounged, conversed, played games, performed or took in music and theater, and romanced one another. I ended up writing my senior thesis on the fêtes galantes and these representations across different artistic media, political, emotional, and aesthetic regimes. But I did not consider myself a dix-huitièmiste and when I began my doctoral studies at Stanford, I was still very much focused on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies in both literature and musical performance (opera and art song). It was not until I began taking requisite period courses on early modern literature and culture—first with Keith Baker and then with Sepp Gumbrecht, Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Dan Edelstein, and John Bender—that I began to feel an inevitable pull toward the eighteenth century. This pull was not so much one of pleasure, but of annoyance. How could the seductive and seemingly well-intentioned universalist thought of the period be so blind, exclusionary, and full of false promises? How could the era of abolitionism also be one in which scientific racism was founded and firmly anchored? And why did we talk so much about the Enlightenment as a pacifistic and cosmopolitan age instead of acknowledging constant dynastic wars on a newly global scale, wars that philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau praised and condemned in equal measure? I was very, very annoyed and full of questions that I became increasingly desperate to answer. I couldn’t avoid the eighteenth century any longer. A dix-huitièmiste (or rather, an early modern scholar) and my first book, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell, 2017), were born!
2. What are you working on right now?
I have a few scholarly projects underway right now. I am writing an article in French on knowledge, power, and military social networks of the French Enlightenment. I am also co-editing a three-part volume for H-France, Race, Racism, and the Study of the French and Francophone World Today, with Emily Marker (Rutgers-Camden). The first issue on research came out in spring 2019 and the volumes on the profession and pedagogy are in process. This has been an exciting and thought-provoking project, especially since the word “race” was stricken from the French Constitution in July 2018 and since many scholars in France view the concept of race as an analytically illegitimate American import. I very much look forward to being on sabbatical in 2019-2020 so that I can make progress and prioritize work on two book-length projects. One involves métissage, racialization, and intersectionality in early modern Europe and the other is a longue durée history of military humanism. Many of my working hours (and also hours that I should not be working!) are also dedicated to service and administrative work. 2017-2018 was the year in which my book came out and I got tenure, so in 2018-2019 the avalanche of post-tenure administrative responsibilities has fallen upon me. Some of this I have taken on with enthusiasm and purpose, especially Ph.D. admissions and projects involving race and pedagogy, diversity, equity, inclusion, and wellbeing in the profession. As the university’s Faculty Fellow for Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellbeing and as the College Coordinator for Diversity and Global Education for Humanities and Social Sciences, I have been researching best practices across American academe over the past 20 years that have aimed to build the pipeline of underrepresented, underserved students and professors (including women and racialized minorities). This research has permitted us to form a vision of what types of initiatives and institutional structures have led to successful outcomes and why many other efforts have failed. Based on this research, we have formed a grand strategy for faculty recruitment and retention at the university level and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences is poised to be a leader in implementing this strategy. At the same time, I have been contributing similar work to the disciplines of eighteenth-century studies and French history. I organized a race and pedagogy workshop for the 2019 ASECS conference, a plenary roundtable on structural racism and a graduate student/early-career faculty workshop for the Western Society for French History, and I serve on several executive boards where I have been trying to enhance inclusiveness and increase awareness of inequities in the profession while empowering people to act against it. As one of few tenured African-American women in the profession, I believe that these efforts constitute some my most important lifework. For me, getting tenure has fulfilled its age-old function in academe: it has given me freedom to speak out, to take action, and in many ways, to be myself.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Following in the footsteps of Sylvie Steinberg, Dominique Godineau, John Lynn, David A. Bell, and others, I was very keen to integrate women’s history as well as gender and sexuality into my work on the French military of the long eighteenth century. One colleague who read parts of The Military Enlightenment in manuscript form told me that the inclusion of women warriors and heroinism, as well as questions of race, were concerns of modern historians that I anachronistically imposed upon early modern French military history. Wrong. I think it is critical to continually question these types of assumptions about supposedly “male” institutions and “masculine” cultures since in many cases historians and literary scholars—as much or more than the historical actors themselves—have rendered women invisible. Otherwise, I am very much engaged in the methods and theoretical concepts that conjoin Critical Race Studies and Women and Gender Studies. I am particularly interested in intersectionality and the challenges of analyzing elastic hierarchies of identity elements that shift or are shifted according to circumstance, audience, and varying sense of agency.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
This is by far the most difficult question! There are many fantastic works that I’ve read recently that sparked my creative and analytical thinking. One that I found particularly interesting and elicited great discussions in my advanced undergraduate/graduate seminar “Race in French and Francophone Film” is Crystal Marie Fleming’s Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Temple University Press, 2017). Fleming is a sociologist who deploys perspectives from Critical Race Studies to connect France’s history of slavery and racial construction to current politics of commemoration, collective memory, and racial oppression. Against a “timeless” notion of French universalist colorblindness, she posits “racial temporality” as a way to historicize and therefore analyze representations of race. As I pursue my work on race in eighteenth-century Europe, I will continue to think about Fleming’s approaches and findings. This book reaffirms my conviction that reading outside of our chronological scope and discipline is not only fruitful, but at times imperative for pushing our own field forward. I will also add that I appreciate Fleming’s stance as a scholar-activist. She says as much in the introduction to her book: “Although Resurrecting Slavery is based on systematic empirical research, it is also unapologetically political” (11). I am excited to read her most recent book, which bridges into public intellectualism, How to Be Less Stupid About Race (Beacon Press, 2018).
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
We acknowledge each other.
We listen to each other.
We amplify one another’s voices.
We help each other bring our “whole selves” to work.
We give each other a break.
We counter micro-aggressions with micro-affirmations.
We address emotional labor and cultural taxation.
We open our scholarly and social circles to new people.
We do not replicate the wrongs done to us.
We recognize different types and goals of feminism.
We promote a diverse range of women’s experiences, writings, and contributions as historically significant and indispensible subjects of inquiry.
We plug into our collective power.
We call oppression, discrimination, and white supremacy by their names.
We make concrete gestures to support one another’s careers: we mentor, we accommodate family schedules and time for self-care, we champion career diversity, we read book proposals, we help place articles in peer-reviewed journals or mass media publications, we elect individuals for leadership positions, we nominate scholarly projects for funding and prizes, we back meritorious renewal and tenure cases, we raise money to support research and conference travel for graduate students, independent scholars, and women working in contingent academic positions, we advocate for better employment conditions for women, especially those in adjunct and lectureship positions.
We will not only make academe better for other women, we will make it better for all.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I would say that eighteenth-century studies pursued me until I couldn’t escape it! Eighteenth-century studies first snuck into my life by way of classical music and art history during my undergraduate years at Princeton. I was a budding classical vocalist and student of comparative literature, focused on nineteenth-century French and Italian poetry. These interests came together while I was learning the French art song repertoire, in particular Claude Debussy’s settings of Paul Verlaine’s fêtes galantes poems. A hopeless nerd, instead of socializing during the fall of my senior year I spent my time researching these songs and poems and discovered that the latter were inspired by paintings by Antoine Watteau dating to the early eighteenth-century. I was enchanted by Watteau’s ethereal aesthetics and sought to learn more about the historical phenomenon of the fêtes galantes: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century garden parties wherein French aristocrats (decked out in formal garb, of course) picnicked, lounged, conversed, played games, performed or took in music and theater, and romanced one another. I ended up writing my senior thesis on the fêtes galantes and these representations across different artistic media, political, emotional, and aesthetic regimes. But I did not consider myself a dix-huitièmiste and when I began my doctoral studies at Stanford, I was still very much focused on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies in both literature and musical performance (opera and art song). It was not until I began taking requisite period courses on early modern literature and culture—first with Keith Baker and then with Sepp Gumbrecht, Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Dan Edelstein, and John Bender—that I began to feel an inevitable pull toward the eighteenth century. This pull was not so much one of pleasure, but of annoyance. How could the seductive and seemingly well-intentioned universalist thought of the period be so blind, exclusionary, and full of false promises? How could the era of abolitionism also be one in which scientific racism was founded and firmly anchored? And why did we talk so much about the Enlightenment as a pacifistic and cosmopolitan age instead of acknowledging constant dynastic wars on a newly global scale, wars that philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau praised and condemned in equal measure? I was very, very annoyed and full of questions that I became increasingly desperate to answer. I couldn’t avoid the eighteenth century any longer. A dix-huitièmiste (or rather, an early modern scholar) and my first book, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell, 2017), were born!
2. What are you working on right now?
I have a few scholarly projects underway right now. I am writing an article in French on knowledge, power, and military social networks of the French Enlightenment. I am also co-editing a three-part volume for H-France, Race, Racism, and the Study of the French and Francophone World Today, with Emily Marker (Rutgers-Camden). The first issue on research came out in spring 2019 and the volumes on the profession and pedagogy are in process. This has been an exciting and thought-provoking project, especially since the word “race” was stricken from the French Constitution in July 2018 and since many scholars in France view the concept of race as an analytically illegitimate American import. I very much look forward to being on sabbatical in 2019-2020 so that I can make progress and prioritize work on two book-length projects. One involves métissage, racialization, and intersectionality in early modern Europe and the other is a longue durée history of military humanism. Many of my working hours (and also hours that I should not be working!) are also dedicated to service and administrative work. 2017-2018 was the year in which my book came out and I got tenure, so in 2018-2019 the avalanche of post-tenure administrative responsibilities has fallen upon me. Some of this I have taken on with enthusiasm and purpose, especially Ph.D. admissions and projects involving race and pedagogy, diversity, equity, inclusion, and wellbeing in the profession. As the university’s Faculty Fellow for Diversity, Inclusion, and Wellbeing and as the College Coordinator for Diversity and Global Education for Humanities and Social Sciences, I have been researching best practices across American academe over the past 20 years that have aimed to build the pipeline of underrepresented, underserved students and professors (including women and racialized minorities). This research has permitted us to form a vision of what types of initiatives and institutional structures have led to successful outcomes and why many other efforts have failed. Based on this research, we have formed a grand strategy for faculty recruitment and retention at the university level and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences is poised to be a leader in implementing this strategy. At the same time, I have been contributing similar work to the disciplines of eighteenth-century studies and French history. I organized a race and pedagogy workshop for the 2019 ASECS conference, a plenary roundtable on structural racism and a graduate student/early-career faculty workshop for the Western Society for French History, and I serve on several executive boards where I have been trying to enhance inclusiveness and increase awareness of inequities in the profession while empowering people to act against it. As one of few tenured African-American women in the profession, I believe that these efforts constitute some my most important lifework. For me, getting tenure has fulfilled its age-old function in academe: it has given me freedom to speak out, to take action, and in many ways, to be myself.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Following in the footsteps of Sylvie Steinberg, Dominique Godineau, John Lynn, David A. Bell, and others, I was very keen to integrate women’s history as well as gender and sexuality into my work on the French military of the long eighteenth century. One colleague who read parts of The Military Enlightenment in manuscript form told me that the inclusion of women warriors and heroinism, as well as questions of race, were concerns of modern historians that I anachronistically imposed upon early modern French military history. Wrong. I think it is critical to continually question these types of assumptions about supposedly “male” institutions and “masculine” cultures since in many cases historians and literary scholars—as much or more than the historical actors themselves—have rendered women invisible. Otherwise, I am very much engaged in the methods and theoretical concepts that conjoin Critical Race Studies and Women and Gender Studies. I am particularly interested in intersectionality and the challenges of analyzing elastic hierarchies of identity elements that shift or are shifted according to circumstance, audience, and varying sense of agency.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
This is by far the most difficult question! There are many fantastic works that I’ve read recently that sparked my creative and analytical thinking. One that I found particularly interesting and elicited great discussions in my advanced undergraduate/graduate seminar “Race in French and Francophone Film” is Crystal Marie Fleming’s Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Temple University Press, 2017). Fleming is a sociologist who deploys perspectives from Critical Race Studies to connect France’s history of slavery and racial construction to current politics of commemoration, collective memory, and racial oppression. Against a “timeless” notion of French universalist colorblindness, she posits “racial temporality” as a way to historicize and therefore analyze representations of race. As I pursue my work on race in eighteenth-century Europe, I will continue to think about Fleming’s approaches and findings. This book reaffirms my conviction that reading outside of our chronological scope and discipline is not only fruitful, but at times imperative for pushing our own field forward. I will also add that I appreciate Fleming’s stance as a scholar-activist. She says as much in the introduction to her book: “Although Resurrecting Slavery is based on systematic empirical research, it is also unapologetically political” (11). I am excited to read her most recent book, which bridges into public intellectualism, How to Be Less Stupid About Race (Beacon Press, 2018).
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
We acknowledge each other.
We listen to each other.
We amplify one another’s voices.
We help each other bring our “whole selves” to work.
We give each other a break.
We counter micro-aggressions with micro-affirmations.
We address emotional labor and cultural taxation.
We open our scholarly and social circles to new people.
We do not replicate the wrongs done to us.
We recognize different types and goals of feminism.
We promote a diverse range of women’s experiences, writings, and contributions as historically significant and indispensible subjects of inquiry.
We plug into our collective power.
We call oppression, discrimination, and white supremacy by their names.
We make concrete gestures to support one another’s careers: we mentor, we accommodate family schedules and time for self-care, we champion career diversity, we read book proposals, we help place articles in peer-reviewed journals or mass media publications, we elect individuals for leadership positions, we nominate scholarly projects for funding and prizes, we back meritorious renewal and tenure cases, we raise money to support research and conference travel for graduate students, independent scholars, and women working in contingent academic positions, we advocate for better employment conditions for women, especially those in adjunct and lectureship positions.
We will not only make academe better for other women, we will make it better for all.
Member of the Month: Nicole Horejsi
How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I fell in love with the eighteenth century when I first saw Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) as a teenager, and again when I encountered Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Frances Burney’s Evelina in an undergraduate course, “The Age of Wit.” Both texts were unlike anything I had ever encountered before, and I was hungry to study the women writers who were underrepresented in my other coursework. Yet it wasn’t until graduate school that I embraced the long eighteenth century as a serious field of study. I entered grad school as a medievalist, intent on researching Arthurian romance, but Felicity Nussbaum’s course on the Bluestockings, which I took during my first semester at UCLA, expanded my horizons so that I could never return. I saw how capacious romance was, as a category, in the long eighteenth century, and the role played by women writers in shaping eighteenth-century fiction, and seized the opportunity to change fields. My dissertation began that very semester with my research on Clara Reeve’s literary-critical dialog, The Progress of Romance (1785).
What are you working on right now? I’ve just finished my first book project, Novel Cleopatras: Romance Historiography and the Dido Tradition in English Fiction, 1688-1785. It is forthcoming in early 2019 from the University of Toronto Press, and includes chapters on Jane Barker, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Clara Reeve. In this project, I extend the tradition of rereading Dido into the eighteenth century, taking up a single national literature and a specific genre—epic’s rival, the novel—at a time when women were entering into the literary marketplace on an unprecedented scale. I argue that writers eager to complicate their classical heritage find in Virgilian epic—with its sympathy, however limited, for Dido’s plight—the groundwork for inventing new histories and mythologies for contemporary readers traditionally marginalized by classical authority. Turning away from the formal and ideological exclusivity of epic and history, which require Dido’s demise, these writers take advantage of the emerging genre of the novel to create a parallel, supplementary, and even competing tradition for eighteenth-century readers. Because Dido and the historical figure whom she represents—Cleopatra—take center stage in the twin projects of reimagining epic and history, I contend that turning to the doomed queens who haunted the Roman imagination enables eighteenth-century novelists to seize the productive overlap among genres—history, romance, novel, even epic—and therefore to disrupt one of the founding narratives of Western civilization and rewrite it for their own ends.
At the same time, I’ve been working on a second book project entitled Enlightenment Timescapes. In this project, I’ve been examining the role of classical allusion as a chief mediator of Britain’s cultural identity, taking up the ways in which classicism creates a companion discourse to the orientalism documented by Edward Said in the context of nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. I argue that, like orientalizing, classicizing needn’t necessarily function in the service of British “allochronism,” the term coined by Johannes Fabian, in his classic critique of anthropology (1983), to describe the relegation of foreign cultures to distant times. Instead, I’m interested in the ways in which eighteenth-century writers disrupt the allochronic impulse that often characterizes accounts of foreign encounters. From fiction to non-fiction, from Restoration theater to eighteenth-century travel narratives, these writers seek to re- and disorient Britain’s place—political, cultural, and ideological—on the global stage. I argue that, by rendering transparent the fictions underwriting temporality itself, eighteenth-century writers resist teleological narratives and, in doing so, embrace the complexities of allusion to engender varying degrees of imaginative—and sometimes real—proximity to foreign peoples and cultures. In revisiting Britain’s dynamic relationship to its classical heritage, I advocate that scholars take seriously the complexities of classicism as a parallel discourse to orientalism in order to re-evaluate how writers deploy ideas about classical culture in representations of cultural difference. If orientalizing often exoticizes the East, collapsing disparate cultures and relegating them to another time, classicizing generates the potential, at least, of a neutral temporality in which the past mediates between self and other in the name of radical coevalness. Part of one of my chapters, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Oriental Timescapes,” is forthcoming in ECTI, and offers completely new ways of thinking about some of Montagu’s most famous letters.
How do you approach or incorporate gender or women’s studies in your work? Women writers and feminist criticism have always been enshrined at the very heart of my scholarship, and when I’m not writing about women, I’m usually writing about feminist approaches to male writers of the period. I’m particularly interested in engaging unexpected ways of thinking about female authorship, especially through the lens of eighteenth-century neoclassicism—or, more appropriately, neoclassicisms. For far too long, critics have by and large assumed that women weren’t agents of neoclassical culture in the same way as their male counterparts, simply because they didn’t have similar access to a classical education. But the history of eighteenth-century neoclassicism is much richer and more textured than it often appears; women writers play no small part in (re)invigorating neoclassical discourses, and I see the study of women in relation to neoclassical culture as an essential part of my career.
What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
As I often do when I’m immersed in a new project, I’ve been revisiting Joe Roach’s Cities of the Dead, Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), an incredibly impressive book in which Roach seamlessly weaves together a variety of disciplines across several cultures and time periods in a rich tapestry of scholarship that exceeds the eighteenth century in order to rethink the relationship between the present and the past. Everything about this book appeals to me. But what always thrills me about Cities of the Dead is the way in which it embodies academic writing as a craft. I return to it again and again in order to lose myself in its lyrical and haunting prose, and to challenge myself to think more about my own voice and stylistic choices as a writer.
What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS? For me, supporting women in academia begins from the ground-up, at the undergraduate level: it’s our responsibility to create syllabi with women writers who fire the imaginations of our students, and to give them the tools necessary to move on to Ph.D. programs where they can continue to discover, and make contributions to, the body of scholarship on women writers. That said, we shouldn’t abandon these students when they become scholars themselves; I’d like to see the academy do more to support lecturers and our junior colleagues, both through networking opportunities and through financial assistance. I’m proud, of course, that the Women’s Caucus is already leading the way in these matters.
How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I fell in love with the eighteenth century when I first saw Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) as a teenager, and again when I encountered Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Frances Burney’s Evelina in an undergraduate course, “The Age of Wit.” Both texts were unlike anything I had ever encountered before, and I was hungry to study the women writers who were underrepresented in my other coursework. Yet it wasn’t until graduate school that I embraced the long eighteenth century as a serious field of study. I entered grad school as a medievalist, intent on researching Arthurian romance, but Felicity Nussbaum’s course on the Bluestockings, which I took during my first semester at UCLA, expanded my horizons so that I could never return. I saw how capacious romance was, as a category, in the long eighteenth century, and the role played by women writers in shaping eighteenth-century fiction, and seized the opportunity to change fields. My dissertation began that very semester with my research on Clara Reeve’s literary-critical dialog, The Progress of Romance (1785).
What are you working on right now? I’ve just finished my first book project, Novel Cleopatras: Romance Historiography and the Dido Tradition in English Fiction, 1688-1785. It is forthcoming in early 2019 from the University of Toronto Press, and includes chapters on Jane Barker, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Clara Reeve. In this project, I extend the tradition of rereading Dido into the eighteenth century, taking up a single national literature and a specific genre—epic’s rival, the novel—at a time when women were entering into the literary marketplace on an unprecedented scale. I argue that writers eager to complicate their classical heritage find in Virgilian epic—with its sympathy, however limited, for Dido’s plight—the groundwork for inventing new histories and mythologies for contemporary readers traditionally marginalized by classical authority. Turning away from the formal and ideological exclusivity of epic and history, which require Dido’s demise, these writers take advantage of the emerging genre of the novel to create a parallel, supplementary, and even competing tradition for eighteenth-century readers. Because Dido and the historical figure whom she represents—Cleopatra—take center stage in the twin projects of reimagining epic and history, I contend that turning to the doomed queens who haunted the Roman imagination enables eighteenth-century novelists to seize the productive overlap among genres—history, romance, novel, even epic—and therefore to disrupt one of the founding narratives of Western civilization and rewrite it for their own ends.
At the same time, I’ve been working on a second book project entitled Enlightenment Timescapes. In this project, I’ve been examining the role of classical allusion as a chief mediator of Britain’s cultural identity, taking up the ways in which classicism creates a companion discourse to the orientalism documented by Edward Said in the context of nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. I argue that, like orientalizing, classicizing needn’t necessarily function in the service of British “allochronism,” the term coined by Johannes Fabian, in his classic critique of anthropology (1983), to describe the relegation of foreign cultures to distant times. Instead, I’m interested in the ways in which eighteenth-century writers disrupt the allochronic impulse that often characterizes accounts of foreign encounters. From fiction to non-fiction, from Restoration theater to eighteenth-century travel narratives, these writers seek to re- and disorient Britain’s place—political, cultural, and ideological—on the global stage. I argue that, by rendering transparent the fictions underwriting temporality itself, eighteenth-century writers resist teleological narratives and, in doing so, embrace the complexities of allusion to engender varying degrees of imaginative—and sometimes real—proximity to foreign peoples and cultures. In revisiting Britain’s dynamic relationship to its classical heritage, I advocate that scholars take seriously the complexities of classicism as a parallel discourse to orientalism in order to re-evaluate how writers deploy ideas about classical culture in representations of cultural difference. If orientalizing often exoticizes the East, collapsing disparate cultures and relegating them to another time, classicizing generates the potential, at least, of a neutral temporality in which the past mediates between self and other in the name of radical coevalness. Part of one of my chapters, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Oriental Timescapes,” is forthcoming in ECTI, and offers completely new ways of thinking about some of Montagu’s most famous letters.
How do you approach or incorporate gender or women’s studies in your work? Women writers and feminist criticism have always been enshrined at the very heart of my scholarship, and when I’m not writing about women, I’m usually writing about feminist approaches to male writers of the period. I’m particularly interested in engaging unexpected ways of thinking about female authorship, especially through the lens of eighteenth-century neoclassicism—or, more appropriately, neoclassicisms. For far too long, critics have by and large assumed that women weren’t agents of neoclassical culture in the same way as their male counterparts, simply because they didn’t have similar access to a classical education. But the history of eighteenth-century neoclassicism is much richer and more textured than it often appears; women writers play no small part in (re)invigorating neoclassical discourses, and I see the study of women in relation to neoclassical culture as an essential part of my career.
What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
As I often do when I’m immersed in a new project, I’ve been revisiting Joe Roach’s Cities of the Dead, Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), an incredibly impressive book in which Roach seamlessly weaves together a variety of disciplines across several cultures and time periods in a rich tapestry of scholarship that exceeds the eighteenth century in order to rethink the relationship between the present and the past. Everything about this book appeals to me. But what always thrills me about Cities of the Dead is the way in which it embodies academic writing as a craft. I return to it again and again in order to lose myself in its lyrical and haunting prose, and to challenge myself to think more about my own voice and stylistic choices as a writer.
What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS? For me, supporting women in academia begins from the ground-up, at the undergraduate level: it’s our responsibility to create syllabi with women writers who fire the imaginations of our students, and to give them the tools necessary to move on to Ph.D. programs where they can continue to discover, and make contributions to, the body of scholarship on women writers. That said, we shouldn’t abandon these students when they become scholars themselves; I’d like to see the academy do more to support lecturers and our junior colleagues, both through networking opportunities and through financial assistance. I’m proud, of course, that the Women’s Caucus is already leading the way in these matters.
Member of the Month: Nicole Aljoe
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I’d been fascinated by the few representations of 18th century Caribbean culture that I’d come into contact with growing up: such as the rumors about the “White Witch of Rose Hall” in Jamaica; the ruins of great houses throughout the island, a section of Michele Cliff’s novel, Abeng. But, my scholarly interest was piqued during a graduate class on the British 18th century taught by Philip Baruth at the University of Vermont. I was surprised to see so many references to the Caribbean and slavery in texts that I’d read before like “Moll Flanders” and “Robinson Crusoe” and thought I’d known. And of course, began to see the connections elsewhere, in texts seemingly outside of the Caribbean colonial context, like “Pamela.” I’m drawn to thinking about how our understanding of 18th century aesthetic culture changes, when we put the Caribbean and slavery at the centers of our lines of inquiry, rather than an ‘inconvenient’ aspect.
2. What are you working on right now?
Right now I’m finishing up a project that explores connections between 18th century narratives of slavery and the early novel in England and Europe. Conversations about relationships between the novel and the slave narrative in the US, tend to distinguish the two or advocate for a progressive framework, in which the apex of the slave narrative genre appropriates elements from the novel. My studies, which join traditional literary analysis with digital tools, suggests that the relationship is more complex and nuanced, particularly when you focus on the early period.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
In addition to focusing on representations of women in my work, I also try to undertake the work itself from a feminist, inclusive, anti-racist perspective. This means trying to be as open-minded about my object of study, rather than trying to make it fit into a pre-established framework. I also try not to rely only on ‘canonical’ work, but am open to considering a broader array of disciplinary work.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
Christina Sharpe’s *In the Wake* Beautifully written, useful and trenchant analysis of the continuing impacts of the colonial slavery.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Recognize the real and sustained academic labor that women engage in, and then effectively value and reward that labor.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I’d been fascinated by the few representations of 18th century Caribbean culture that I’d come into contact with growing up: such as the rumors about the “White Witch of Rose Hall” in Jamaica; the ruins of great houses throughout the island, a section of Michele Cliff’s novel, Abeng. But, my scholarly interest was piqued during a graduate class on the British 18th century taught by Philip Baruth at the University of Vermont. I was surprised to see so many references to the Caribbean and slavery in texts that I’d read before like “Moll Flanders” and “Robinson Crusoe” and thought I’d known. And of course, began to see the connections elsewhere, in texts seemingly outside of the Caribbean colonial context, like “Pamela.” I’m drawn to thinking about how our understanding of 18th century aesthetic culture changes, when we put the Caribbean and slavery at the centers of our lines of inquiry, rather than an ‘inconvenient’ aspect.
2. What are you working on right now?
Right now I’m finishing up a project that explores connections between 18th century narratives of slavery and the early novel in England and Europe. Conversations about relationships between the novel and the slave narrative in the US, tend to distinguish the two or advocate for a progressive framework, in which the apex of the slave narrative genre appropriates elements from the novel. My studies, which join traditional literary analysis with digital tools, suggests that the relationship is more complex and nuanced, particularly when you focus on the early period.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
In addition to focusing on representations of women in my work, I also try to undertake the work itself from a feminist, inclusive, anti-racist perspective. This means trying to be as open-minded about my object of study, rather than trying to make it fit into a pre-established framework. I also try not to rely only on ‘canonical’ work, but am open to considering a broader array of disciplinary work.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
Christina Sharpe’s *In the Wake* Beautifully written, useful and trenchant analysis of the continuing impacts of the colonial slavery.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Recognize the real and sustained academic labor that women engage in, and then effectively value and reward that labor.
Member of the Month: Sarah Creel
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?Ah, that’s a long (possibly boring!) story, but let me see if I can explain: I was always the child tucked away reading somewhere, so when I told my mom that I wanted to be a nursing major at Auburn University my freshman year of college, I think she was a bit shocked. Luckily, she had the foresight to talk me into working a summer at a local hospital, and it turns out that blood grossed me out (moms are so smart), so I walked back into my sophomore year of college and changed my major to English as fast as I could get an advising appointment. From there, I switched schools to a small liberal arts university just south of Montevallo, Alabama—a move that changed my life. Montevallo opened up worlds that I didn’t know possible; the small class sizes and fantastic professors nurtured and developed my love of reading, of writing, of thinking critically. Most importantly, Montevallo introduced me to Dr. Kathryn King who has become one of the most salient figures in not only my academic life, but also my personal life. Her MA class (I stayed at Montevallo for my masters degree) on the rise of the female-centered 18th century novel flipped a literary switch for me. King was deep in the throes of her first foray into Haywood, and it was one of the greatest pleasures of my academic life to be introduced to Haywood’s work by her. I was hooked.
2. What are you working on right now?
I teach a 5/4 load as a Lecturer at Kennesaw State University, so writing is something I have to reach for. Finding the time and the headspace has not been easy, but I teach at least four British Literature survey classes a year (late 1700s-present), so I stretch the boundaries of the survey to include usually Haywood and a few other of my favorites. I also had the opportunity to teach an 18th century course in the major last Spring, and I taught a Rise of the Female-Authored novel course to majors, which was such a delight. I’m focusing on teaching for this answer because quite honestly, this is what I have time to pour my energy into. But I think quite a bit about how much I miss the writing and researching life, and I have to remind myself that I haven’t abandoned it altogether. I’m absolutely delighted to attend the “Eliza Haywood: 300 Years of Love in Excess” conference in April, and I’ve been working on my paper for that, which is something that I would eventually like to see published. The paper looks at Haywood’s oeuvre through the lens of identity construction. I want to examine Haywood’s authorial personae in early works such as A Wife to Be Lett and The Tea-Table and think about how she positions herself in these text in comparison with later works like The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. I enjoy taking what Juliette Merrit has called “the long view” of Haywood studies, and I think that looking at how Haywood postures and reputation builds is an underexplored area of Haywood studies.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women’s studies in your work?
Gender and women’s studies have been the center of my work since I began writing academically. I focus specifically on Eliza Haywood in my scholarship, but I have always been interested in women’s lived experience as represented through their writing. Works like Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” in which Bradstreet writes of the shame she feels upon finding her work published—going even as far as to compare it to a child she cannot love—have interested me from the beginning of my career. Women express so much through their writing—shame, pride, subversive proto-feminist messages to other women…I’m committed to using feminist theory and praxis in order to uncover these voices and listen to what they have to tell us about the life of the female author (and women in general) in the eighteenth century.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I have been working on my aforementioned authorial personae essay, so I have been leaning heavily on Manushag Powell’s Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals. I lean on Powell’s definition of the eidolon as a self-consciously performative vehicle for launching textual voices into the world. This performance of authorship, according to Powell, helps negotiate a fluid sense of identity, and while Powell is working with periodicals and periodical culture, I want to look at several examples of identity construction through authorial personae in Haywood’s fiction and drama, so I find her work incredibly helpful. Plus, her writing is so smart and engaging to read—it’s an excellent model for me.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
This might be a controversial answer to this question, but I have been thinking a lot about how we can support female scholars who have taken alternative academic or non-traditional career paths. We’re all aware of the paucity of tenure track jobs available, and I think it’s time that we broaden our sphere of support to women who are doing their best to stay in the field while also holding down jobs that aren’t tenure track or even academic (clearly this is a personal topic for me). It’s time we ask ourselves how we can reach out to lecturers, adjuncts, administrators, contract teachers, high school teachers, independent scholars, etc. How can we support them as they navigate a career that does not support (time-wise or financially) an academic agenda? I think the answer lies in reaching out—offering these women space to complain, brainstorm, whatever they need to be reminded that they are a part of this community regardless of being outside the traditional space of the English department or the tenure track. Sharing resources such as articles, library passwords, and even hotel rooms at conferences for colleagues who don’t have travel budgets are also helpful ways to support these scholars. Further to this, invite us to co-author articles or join reading groups. We are in a time where the traditional route of graduate student to assistant professor is becoming less and less a reality. Expanding our feminist practice to accept more non-traditional scholarly jobs—and more importantly, those women working within them—is one thing we can do to make sure that their voices are not lost.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?Ah, that’s a long (possibly boring!) story, but let me see if I can explain: I was always the child tucked away reading somewhere, so when I told my mom that I wanted to be a nursing major at Auburn University my freshman year of college, I think she was a bit shocked. Luckily, she had the foresight to talk me into working a summer at a local hospital, and it turns out that blood grossed me out (moms are so smart), so I walked back into my sophomore year of college and changed my major to English as fast as I could get an advising appointment. From there, I switched schools to a small liberal arts university just south of Montevallo, Alabama—a move that changed my life. Montevallo opened up worlds that I didn’t know possible; the small class sizes and fantastic professors nurtured and developed my love of reading, of writing, of thinking critically. Most importantly, Montevallo introduced me to Dr. Kathryn King who has become one of the most salient figures in not only my academic life, but also my personal life. Her MA class (I stayed at Montevallo for my masters degree) on the rise of the female-centered 18th century novel flipped a literary switch for me. King was deep in the throes of her first foray into Haywood, and it was one of the greatest pleasures of my academic life to be introduced to Haywood’s work by her. I was hooked.
2. What are you working on right now?
I teach a 5/4 load as a Lecturer at Kennesaw State University, so writing is something I have to reach for. Finding the time and the headspace has not been easy, but I teach at least four British Literature survey classes a year (late 1700s-present), so I stretch the boundaries of the survey to include usually Haywood and a few other of my favorites. I also had the opportunity to teach an 18th century course in the major last Spring, and I taught a Rise of the Female-Authored novel course to majors, which was such a delight. I’m focusing on teaching for this answer because quite honestly, this is what I have time to pour my energy into. But I think quite a bit about how much I miss the writing and researching life, and I have to remind myself that I haven’t abandoned it altogether. I’m absolutely delighted to attend the “Eliza Haywood: 300 Years of Love in Excess” conference in April, and I’ve been working on my paper for that, which is something that I would eventually like to see published. The paper looks at Haywood’s oeuvre through the lens of identity construction. I want to examine Haywood’s authorial personae in early works such as A Wife to Be Lett and The Tea-Table and think about how she positions herself in these text in comparison with later works like The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. I enjoy taking what Juliette Merrit has called “the long view” of Haywood studies, and I think that looking at how Haywood postures and reputation builds is an underexplored area of Haywood studies.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women’s studies in your work?
Gender and women’s studies have been the center of my work since I began writing academically. I focus specifically on Eliza Haywood in my scholarship, but I have always been interested in women’s lived experience as represented through their writing. Works like Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” in which Bradstreet writes of the shame she feels upon finding her work published—going even as far as to compare it to a child she cannot love—have interested me from the beginning of my career. Women express so much through their writing—shame, pride, subversive proto-feminist messages to other women…I’m committed to using feminist theory and praxis in order to uncover these voices and listen to what they have to tell us about the life of the female author (and women in general) in the eighteenth century.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I have been working on my aforementioned authorial personae essay, so I have been leaning heavily on Manushag Powell’s Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals. I lean on Powell’s definition of the eidolon as a self-consciously performative vehicle for launching textual voices into the world. This performance of authorship, according to Powell, helps negotiate a fluid sense of identity, and while Powell is working with periodicals and periodical culture, I want to look at several examples of identity construction through authorial personae in Haywood’s fiction and drama, so I find her work incredibly helpful. Plus, her writing is so smart and engaging to read—it’s an excellent model for me.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
This might be a controversial answer to this question, but I have been thinking a lot about how we can support female scholars who have taken alternative academic or non-traditional career paths. We’re all aware of the paucity of tenure track jobs available, and I think it’s time that we broaden our sphere of support to women who are doing their best to stay in the field while also holding down jobs that aren’t tenure track or even academic (clearly this is a personal topic for me). It’s time we ask ourselves how we can reach out to lecturers, adjuncts, administrators, contract teachers, high school teachers, independent scholars, etc. How can we support them as they navigate a career that does not support (time-wise or financially) an academic agenda? I think the answer lies in reaching out—offering these women space to complain, brainstorm, whatever they need to be reminded that they are a part of this community regardless of being outside the traditional space of the English department or the tenure track. Sharing resources such as articles, library passwords, and even hotel rooms at conferences for colleagues who don’t have travel budgets are also helpful ways to support these scholars. Further to this, invite us to co-author articles or join reading groups. We are in a time where the traditional route of graduate student to assistant professor is becoming less and less a reality. Expanding our feminist practice to accept more non-traditional scholarly jobs—and more importantly, those women working within them—is one thing we can do to make sure that their voices are not lost.
Member of the Month: Kate Ozment
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I took a class on the eighteenth century with Marta Kvande at Texas Tech University when I was doing my undergrad degree in English. After we read Tristram Shandy, it was just over for me. True love. I was so smitten with how experimental the novel was and how much it pushed at the boundaries of what print was capable of doing and signifying to readers. So much of what Sterne is doing with Tristram I recognized with digital experimentations in text and storytelling, and eventually Dr. Kvande helped me realize that what I was interested in was media and the technology of literature. It took a lot of years and several exceptional mentors to help me form that into a cogent research program, but it all started back in 2008 with me reading Tristram Shandy and feeling all of the impact of pathos from that black page.
The other part of this story is that I grew up in this Age of Austen, and I watched the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in middle school. I read every novel, read a load of fan fiction, got her handwriting tattooed on my shoulder—the works. Austen was my gateway drug, and she pulled me into this wonderful community of women’s literature scholars. She’s the reason I took Dr. Kvande’s class to begin with. While pop culture can distort a lot of what we do down to reductive listicles and sound bites, I do think stories like mine are an important thing to remember when we think about bringing new fans and scholars into our classrooms.
2. What are you working on right now?
In addition to a few smaller projects on women’s writing in print, largely I’ve been working on a book on women bibliographers in the twentieth century. It is a bit afield of where I thought I would be, but I think of this as my deeply personal Room of One’s Own: sometimes you need to create that baseline literary history and hope it will resonate despite its flaws. I got here because most of the work I do is within women’s book history, and eighteenth-century studies in particular has been wonderful about exploring the intersection of gender and materiality, especially scholars like Margaret J.M. Ezell, Michelle Levy, and Betty A. Schellenberg. But very little of our work impacts the broader field of book history, and I’m endlessly fascinated as to how dialogues between fields, subfields, time periods, and methods work. But I did not want to only pull from the eighteenth century in an effort to articulate a theory of women’s book history; it would be too limited and would repeat some of our oldest sins of a British-centic white literary history. The project demanded that I broaden my interests.So to complicate the white male bibliographer picture of book history, I’m pursuing contributions of women to the field—people like K. M. Metcalfe who Janine Barchas has argued is the “real” editor of Austen’s works. There are so many examples of stories like Metcalfe: cataloguers whose handwriting forms the basis of our research guides and methods, collectors who scooped up and described with careful detail the provenance of women’s manuscript and printed writing, those whose work was published under their husbands’ names, uncredited editorial labor, and the countless librarians whose labor preserving and making accessible collections of African American and children’s literature have made archival and rare book research possible. All these figures are part of our literary history of women’s writing and preservation in the eighteenth century, and it is humbling to try and tell their stories.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
The thing women’s literary studies has given me is to never believe the story “they just weren’t there” or “women didn’t do that.” This was what my dissertation director advised me during my first year of my doctoral program, and it’s been proven true time and time again. Women are always there. The issue is sometimes we just haven’t looked. Those are the easy projects. Usually, it is more difficult. It is because our methods of looking for them are not calibrated to find women. This could be that we define “literature” a certain way, conveniently in that it neglects a lot of women’s writing. It could be that we define “woman” a certain way, overlooking how “woman” is a historical category more than biological essentialism. It could be value judgments like what is “good” or worth reading, and such judgments have historically worked against marginalized subjects and authors. These projects lay bare your method of thinking about literature, your research methods, and even your own assumptions. In other words, I’m constantly correcting how I speak about these figures with the faint glimmer of hope that I will one day find language that’s both descriptive and flexible enough for the dynamism of eighteenth-century women.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
I am going to cheat and offer two: Imtiaz H. Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives 1500-1677 and Onyeka’s Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England. Both are so useful for their engagement with original documents, archival practices, and narrative-building as they analyze how the myth of the white English history was constructed and has been perpetuated. I have been trying to un-learn my version of English history and instead explore all of its complexity and multicultural roots, both for myself and to be a better teacher of this period. These books challenge me in the best way possible.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
What has truly helped me through this very interesting post-grad-school period of transition is the mentorship and support that I have received from people who, perhaps not surprisingly, are in the women’s caucus. Being an early career scholar is hard no matter what, and if you’re also navigating being a woman, being queer, etc. then it can feel hugely intimidating to work through the massive ASECS conference or find your community of people. These networks help so much, with everything from a “hey I’ve been there, too” that can be so comforting when you are confronting imposter syndrome to people sending you samples of book proposals and abstracts. These informal exchanges changed people in my mind from Big Name Scholar Whose Work I Admire And Therefore Is Too Intimidating to Talk To to person whose work I really admire who is also kind and approachable and a human being. Not everyone is like that of course, but enough are that it makes this seem less like you’re the only faker in a room full of Professionals.
Susan Carlile
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
My route is a bit circuitous. I taught English in Madrid for three years after college and became interested in Spanish literature. So when I returned to the US and began teaching high school in Phoenix, I hoped to get an MA in Spanish literature. However, at that time Arizona State did not offer Spanish literature classes at night. I had a hunch that there must have been an English author who had been influenced by a Spanish one, so I enrolled in the English MA program. Soon I found Charlotte Lennox, author of The Female Quixote, and ended up writing my MA thesis on this insightful and satirical novel. I became fascinated with Lennox’s pluck, persistence, and prolific output in the early years of professional authorship in London, started studying her other works, and collected all I could about her. My interest in how she managed to publish so much, in so many different genres, and with such interestingly subversive subtexts served as my way in to eighteenth-century studies.
2. What are you working on right now?
Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind came out with Toronto University Press in April. Aside from giving myself more time to enjoy teaching and re-think a few of my courses, I am promoting the book. In fact, I am finding that getting the word out could turn into a full-time job. I am experimenting with how to use social media effectively, including retooling ideas from my book into blog posts. In addition to my own professional twitter account @susancarlile, I also tweet @LadysMuseum as Charlotte Lennox. My current research includes women’s involvement in natural history at mid-century, how it was expressed in women’s periodicals, and how and why magazine installments addressing women’s education circulated between England and Spain.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Questions that have driven my work center around how the English literary canon was formed: What interests privileged one kind of imaginative writing over another? What conditions facilitated a person to set her ideas down on paper? Why one genre over another? And how did these piece end up in print? Also, what criteria have those with power in the academy used to select the best literary productions? Many women authors have only begun to be taken seriously in the last twenty years. This blows my students’ minds. They like reading texts like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, and Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta, none of which were taught when I took graduate classes in the 1990s. My work has centered on women writers’ lives and works because a well-researched critical biography gives author’s more validity. So many intellectual women’s lives have been lost due to their lower status and their perceived inferior value to history. I was motivated by the fact that so many biographies have been written about Shakespeare when only something like five sure facts exist about him.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
I have been thinking about how we can promote our tireless research and fascinating findings to a larger audience. This summer I read Abigail William’s The Social Life of Books (Yale University Press) and really enjoyed it. Williams gives us a more detailed picture of the function and influence of the wide practice of communal reading and shows the value of print for the tradesman, the merchant, the clergyman, the sister, and the mother. She makes lesser-studied literary output engaging to wider audiences and shows how these print productions had a powerful effect on individual lives and on an emerging literary culture.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I find it useful to remember to take the long view of one’s career. Most of us have seasons of more productivity and less. There are times when we absolutely must focus intensely on our research and writing and other times when teaching, university service, and family will capture more of our attention. It is important however, even in these times when other aspects of life seem to be taking over to fight for our research and writing time. The key is to stay in the game…even just a little. For me, informal conversations and virtual writing huddles have fueled my work in meaningful ways. Hearing other people’s strategies for squeezing in writing between a myriad of responsibilities and honest acknowledgements when their work is going very, very slowly have helped me remember that research and writing is sometimes a tedious and lonely road for everyone who eventually publishes. Knowing that there are others out there also elbowing out half-hour chunks of time as often as possible to work on what some days feels very obscure has frequently buoyed my spirits and gotten me back in my chair for another half-hour session, that sometimes turns into an hour and a half. Those small chunks of time feed one’s energy to then steal and beg for larger chunks of time, which can (amazingly) add up to finished products. From these frank confabs with trusted colleagues I have learned to have (a little bit) more patience with myself to simply persevere in the research and writing that is important to me and in the struggle to find ways to make that work interesting to more people.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
My route is a bit circuitous. I taught English in Madrid for three years after college and became interested in Spanish literature. So when I returned to the US and began teaching high school in Phoenix, I hoped to get an MA in Spanish literature. However, at that time Arizona State did not offer Spanish literature classes at night. I had a hunch that there must have been an English author who had been influenced by a Spanish one, so I enrolled in the English MA program. Soon I found Charlotte Lennox, author of The Female Quixote, and ended up writing my MA thesis on this insightful and satirical novel. I became fascinated with Lennox’s pluck, persistence, and prolific output in the early years of professional authorship in London, started studying her other works, and collected all I could about her. My interest in how she managed to publish so much, in so many different genres, and with such interestingly subversive subtexts served as my way in to eighteenth-century studies.
2. What are you working on right now?
Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind came out with Toronto University Press in April. Aside from giving myself more time to enjoy teaching and re-think a few of my courses, I am promoting the book. In fact, I am finding that getting the word out could turn into a full-time job. I am experimenting with how to use social media effectively, including retooling ideas from my book into blog posts. In addition to my own professional twitter account @susancarlile, I also tweet @LadysMuseum as Charlotte Lennox. My current research includes women’s involvement in natural history at mid-century, how it was expressed in women’s periodicals, and how and why magazine installments addressing women’s education circulated between England and Spain.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Questions that have driven my work center around how the English literary canon was formed: What interests privileged one kind of imaginative writing over another? What conditions facilitated a person to set her ideas down on paper? Why one genre over another? And how did these piece end up in print? Also, what criteria have those with power in the academy used to select the best literary productions? Many women authors have only begun to be taken seriously in the last twenty years. This blows my students’ minds. They like reading texts like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, and Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta, none of which were taught when I took graduate classes in the 1990s. My work has centered on women writers’ lives and works because a well-researched critical biography gives author’s more validity. So many intellectual women’s lives have been lost due to their lower status and their perceived inferior value to history. I was motivated by the fact that so many biographies have been written about Shakespeare when only something like five sure facts exist about him.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why?
I have been thinking about how we can promote our tireless research and fascinating findings to a larger audience. This summer I read Abigail William’s The Social Life of Books (Yale University Press) and really enjoyed it. Williams gives us a more detailed picture of the function and influence of the wide practice of communal reading and shows the value of print for the tradesman, the merchant, the clergyman, the sister, and the mother. She makes lesser-studied literary output engaging to wider audiences and shows how these print productions had a powerful effect on individual lives and on an emerging literary culture.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I find it useful to remember to take the long view of one’s career. Most of us have seasons of more productivity and less. There are times when we absolutely must focus intensely on our research and writing and other times when teaching, university service, and family will capture more of our attention. It is important however, even in these times when other aspects of life seem to be taking over to fight for our research and writing time. The key is to stay in the game…even just a little. For me, informal conversations and virtual writing huddles have fueled my work in meaningful ways. Hearing other people’s strategies for squeezing in writing between a myriad of responsibilities and honest acknowledgements when their work is going very, very slowly have helped me remember that research and writing is sometimes a tedious and lonely road for everyone who eventually publishes. Knowing that there are others out there also elbowing out half-hour chunks of time as often as possible to work on what some days feels very obscure has frequently buoyed my spirits and gotten me back in my chair for another half-hour session, that sometimes turns into an hour and a half. Those small chunks of time feed one’s energy to then steal and beg for larger chunks of time, which can (amazingly) add up to finished products. From these frank confabs with trusted colleagues I have learned to have (a little bit) more patience with myself to simply persevere in the research and writing that is important to me and in the struggle to find ways to make that work interesting to more people.
Megan Peiser
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I was originally studying early nineteenth-century women writers, when one semester in my graduate program I took two courses simultaneously: an eighteenth-century philosophy course and a history of the book course. Reading the words of Mary Astell, while learning about eighteenth-century printing practices romanced me backward from my original course of study.
2. What are you working on right now?
I am currently working on building necessary back tables, and a user interface for the Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820, as well as a Monograph on British Women Novelists and the Review Periodical, 1790-1820. I will soon be taking a research trip to England to look into publishers’ records to track how they interacted with book reviews. I’m also collaborating on a project on the history of the Hicks Collection—a collection at Oakland University Special Collections of over 700 items by and about women writers published in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
My work largely focuses on women during the period, both their lived experiences as we can excavate them from their textual remnants, and how eighteenth-century rhetoric has built our current scholarly understanding of those women. I am always interested to look in places that scholars have already explored extensively to see what new things we can find if we rotate our mode of query. Just because an author or topic or work has been studied does not mean that it is exhausted—often we are perpetuating the same arguments over and over, rather than wondering what voices these sources have yet to give up. This is why I love periodicals—even when we think we have figured out what they say, we find new voices within them: their printers, their authors, the children who delivered them along the street—their reprints, their fragmented-scrapbook-page lives, their representation of a moment frozen in time.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
Well I’m always reading the most up-to-date news on scholars’ work on Twitter—that is where so much of my community has come from in the past few years! Rachel Scarborough King’s chapter on “‘Let a girl read’: Periodicals and Women’s Literary Canon formation” (2018) has helped invigorate my work on the Minerva Press, and James Asher’s research on the Philosophical Transactions in Scholar’s Lab blog posts are so insightful and innovative—they remind me to push the envelope where methodology is concerned! I’ve also been sharing work and ideas via email (and a lot of text messages!) with Kate Ozment. We exchange discoveries, and bumps in the road, witty articles, and frustrating citations (darn those Victorians who refuse to cite things so that you could ever find them again!).
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Women need more "safe people" —allies that women and other marginalized peoples can honestly ask questions of to navigate everything from department politics, and conference procedures, to course-planning and navigating reader-comments. I loved the buttons at the last ASECS that marked people as “approachable” mentors, and I’m a big fan of gathering up all your extroverted-ness to throw out there when you can be an ally so that others aren’t searching for you. Invite people to dinner. Ask them about their work. Steer them away from a difficult situation. Knowing that there is a safety-net will make ASECS and academia a place where a greater diversity of scholars can thrive.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I was originally studying early nineteenth-century women writers, when one semester in my graduate program I took two courses simultaneously: an eighteenth-century philosophy course and a history of the book course. Reading the words of Mary Astell, while learning about eighteenth-century printing practices romanced me backward from my original course of study.
2. What are you working on right now?
I am currently working on building necessary back tables, and a user interface for the Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820, as well as a Monograph on British Women Novelists and the Review Periodical, 1790-1820. I will soon be taking a research trip to England to look into publishers’ records to track how they interacted with book reviews. I’m also collaborating on a project on the history of the Hicks Collection—a collection at Oakland University Special Collections of over 700 items by and about women writers published in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
My work largely focuses on women during the period, both their lived experiences as we can excavate them from their textual remnants, and how eighteenth-century rhetoric has built our current scholarly understanding of those women. I am always interested to look in places that scholars have already explored extensively to see what new things we can find if we rotate our mode of query. Just because an author or topic or work has been studied does not mean that it is exhausted—often we are perpetuating the same arguments over and over, rather than wondering what voices these sources have yet to give up. This is why I love periodicals—even when we think we have figured out what they say, we find new voices within them: their printers, their authors, the children who delivered them along the street—their reprints, their fragmented-scrapbook-page lives, their representation of a moment frozen in time.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
Well I’m always reading the most up-to-date news on scholars’ work on Twitter—that is where so much of my community has come from in the past few years! Rachel Scarborough King’s chapter on “‘Let a girl read’: Periodicals and Women’s Literary Canon formation” (2018) has helped invigorate my work on the Minerva Press, and James Asher’s research on the Philosophical Transactions in Scholar’s Lab blog posts are so insightful and innovative—they remind me to push the envelope where methodology is concerned! I’ve also been sharing work and ideas via email (and a lot of text messages!) with Kate Ozment. We exchange discoveries, and bumps in the road, witty articles, and frustrating citations (darn those Victorians who refuse to cite things so that you could ever find them again!).
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Women need more "safe people" —allies that women and other marginalized peoples can honestly ask questions of to navigate everything from department politics, and conference procedures, to course-planning and navigating reader-comments. I loved the buttons at the last ASECS that marked people as “approachable” mentors, and I’m a big fan of gathering up all your extroverted-ness to throw out there when you can be an ally so that others aren’t searching for you. Invite people to dinner. Ask them about their work. Steer them away from a difficult situation. Knowing that there is a safety-net will make ASECS and academia a place where a greater diversity of scholars can thrive.
Member of the Month: Alessa Johns
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
When I went to graduate school I thought I was going to be a medievalist, but then in a class we read Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and I was hooked. For one thing, after reading Latin, it seemed amazing and so efficient to read English. But Roxana’s character! and the themes in that novel—they just fascinated me.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’m working on two connected projects at the moment, both of which follow from my book Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750-1837 (2014). They might come together in a monograph, since both have to do with the eighteenth-century “contact zone,” as Mary Louise Pratt calls it, between British and German culture. The first concerns English-language instruction in Germany. Surprisingly, the first person appointed to be a Professor of English was a man named John Tompson—at the University of Göttingen, in Lower Saxony, not at a British university. He put together an important, very up-to-date British Literature anthology that was used all over German-speaking lands. I’m interested in the students and lay people who used his text and how they went about learning the English language via the literature and the culture. My second project looks at German-language newspapers in London. They give us a good idea of the German immigrant community in the city, and as you might imagine, those people do not fit stereotypes—they were not Kantian philosophers and did not resemble characters in a play by August von Kotzebue, who was so popular Jane Austen incorporated his Lovers’ Vows into the plot of Mansfield Park. So by looking at the newspapers we get a different idea about how German immigrants absorbed and influenced British life that includes material and not just intellectual and literary culture.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Up until now I have probably focused 95% of my work on women and gender. When I was in graduate school thinking about a dissertation I got caught up in the recovery project. And I still believe it’s one of the most important pursuits that has taken place and is still underway in literary studies. It may seem hard to believe, but when I was an undergraduate I had no female professors, and when I went to grad school the syllabus for my eighteenth-century seminar had no women on it. I was determined to change both those situations to the extent that I could. The recovery project has made a huge difference.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
In the mail I just got my copy of Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Nush Powell. It’s a huge, important book that will open doors to all sorts of exciting new scholarship using newspapers and magazines. There are so many amazing essays with such great research! It’s fun just to see all the topics covered. Up to now periodicals have not gotten as much attention as they deserve; our understanding of British history and of the role of women and gender will expand enormously because of this collection.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I think feminist scholars should continue to support the hiring and promotion of women in the academy in every way they can; to stimulate students’ interest in women writers and gender questions in the long eighteenth century by designing creative and interesting syllabi; to encourage the ongoing project recovering women writers; and to urge colleagues to share their findings about women writers at the ASECS meeting. I’ve gotten lots of ideas for my syllabi and my research by hearing ASECS presentations. Also, the regional eighteenth-century studies meetings like WSECS and SEASECS are a great place for graduate students and beginning scholars to gain experience presenting their work—I hope everyone can attend and support their regional meetings. And I’m glad that the proceeds from the Masquerade Ball will support scholars in non-tenure-track positions, which is very important as well. Feminists have made a huge difference and I am happy to see that they continue to do so year after year!
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
When I went to graduate school I thought I was going to be a medievalist, but then in a class we read Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and I was hooked. For one thing, after reading Latin, it seemed amazing and so efficient to read English. But Roxana’s character! and the themes in that novel—they just fascinated me.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’m working on two connected projects at the moment, both of which follow from my book Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750-1837 (2014). They might come together in a monograph, since both have to do with the eighteenth-century “contact zone,” as Mary Louise Pratt calls it, between British and German culture. The first concerns English-language instruction in Germany. Surprisingly, the first person appointed to be a Professor of English was a man named John Tompson—at the University of Göttingen, in Lower Saxony, not at a British university. He put together an important, very up-to-date British Literature anthology that was used all over German-speaking lands. I’m interested in the students and lay people who used his text and how they went about learning the English language via the literature and the culture. My second project looks at German-language newspapers in London. They give us a good idea of the German immigrant community in the city, and as you might imagine, those people do not fit stereotypes—they were not Kantian philosophers and did not resemble characters in a play by August von Kotzebue, who was so popular Jane Austen incorporated his Lovers’ Vows into the plot of Mansfield Park. So by looking at the newspapers we get a different idea about how German immigrants absorbed and influenced British life that includes material and not just intellectual and literary culture.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Up until now I have probably focused 95% of my work on women and gender. When I was in graduate school thinking about a dissertation I got caught up in the recovery project. And I still believe it’s one of the most important pursuits that has taken place and is still underway in literary studies. It may seem hard to believe, but when I was an undergraduate I had no female professors, and when I went to grad school the syllabus for my eighteenth-century seminar had no women on it. I was determined to change both those situations to the extent that I could. The recovery project has made a huge difference.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
In the mail I just got my copy of Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Nush Powell. It’s a huge, important book that will open doors to all sorts of exciting new scholarship using newspapers and magazines. There are so many amazing essays with such great research! It’s fun just to see all the topics covered. Up to now periodicals have not gotten as much attention as they deserve; our understanding of British history and of the role of women and gender will expand enormously because of this collection.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I think feminist scholars should continue to support the hiring and promotion of women in the academy in every way they can; to stimulate students’ interest in women writers and gender questions in the long eighteenth century by designing creative and interesting syllabi; to encourage the ongoing project recovering women writers; and to urge colleagues to share their findings about women writers at the ASECS meeting. I’ve gotten lots of ideas for my syllabi and my research by hearing ASECS presentations. Also, the regional eighteenth-century studies meetings like WSECS and SEASECS are a great place for graduate students and beginning scholars to gain experience presenting their work—I hope everyone can attend and support their regional meetings. And I’m glad that the proceeds from the Masquerade Ball will support scholars in non-tenure-track positions, which is very important as well. Feminists have made a huge difference and I am happy to see that they continue to do so year after year!
Women's Caucus Member of the Month: Rachel Seiler-Smith
How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I took a Restoration and Eighteenth-Century literature course during my undergraduate career. From the start, I became engrossed in our readings—they were so bizarre. Too raunchy and peculiar to feel familiar, yet strangely edgy and provocative. The texts made me laugh with their wit; they frustrated and alienated me with their representations of people; mostly they left me thinking about the roots of our modernity, and I wanted more. I started reading all of Richardson’s novels for fun (impossible, right?), I consumed all of Burney’s plays and tomes at rapid pace, and I became a quick study in the Anti/Federalist papers, Romantic poetry, and gothic novels. By the time I arrived at graduate school, I declared myself an eighteenth-century scholar because I knew this period would continue to amuse and confound me.
What are you working on right now?
I’m at work on two projects that bring together my interests in feminist theories on violence and precarity, medical humanities, and literary form. First, I’m revising my dissertation, Un/Accountable Enlightenment, into a book. It argues that any biopolitical inquiry into the period demands new literary formal histories beyond the novel and the lyric. I outline the form of the “account” as the ars politica of the eighteenth-century popular imagination—an aesthetic and epistemological form of representing the masses that carries with it deep ethical resonances for our present population crises. The second project, The Law’s Spine, tracks the period’s cultural grooming of doctors as witnesses for, and servants of, Britain’s juridical arm, underwritten by policy. By extension, the book traces too the subsequent narrative strategies that impugned the harm done by this fragile alliance between surgeon and state. Right now, I’m doing research for one of the chapters on Romantic anthropodermic bibliopegy (binding books in human skin), and expanding an early chapter draft on John Milton, marriage law, and gendered metabolism in the late seventeenth century.
How do you incorporate gender or women’s studies in your work?
I admit that I’m a feminist literary critic first, and an eighteenth-century studies scholar second. I think of feminism as praxis—a way of reading and an embodied practice. So even when I am writing chapters that don’t take up gender and sexuality explicitly, I am still doing feminist work because my method of reading, and the questions I ask of our approaches to history and texts, are feminist. For me, this means cultivating a sensitivity to forms of violence and exploitation, and particularly to subtle and insidious forms of harm that often go unregistered or ignored in our histories, and telling the histories that "hurt," to coin Sara Ahmed. That said, much of my work focuses on issues in women’s health and reproduction, women’s political involvement, and the intersections of race, class, and gender in eighteenth-century consumption (economic and food/medical) practices.
What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I'm reading Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger. It's prompting a lot of questions for me about what it means to do feminist literary history, and particularly history of medicine. And, going back to praxis, the book also urges me to redefine what it means to be a feminist within institutions of higher learning.
What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Broadly, I think we need to continue recognizing the work of women (writing, teaching, scholarship) as central rather than a niche category in our journals and anthologies; and we need to advocate continually for adjuncts and graduate students, so many of whom are women in precarious situations economically, professionally, personally. In ASECS I have been inspired by our conversations about making our support of women more intersectional, so I think we need to continue our efforts in making eighteenth-century studies a more diverse field that needs intersectional scholarship to thrive. This means we need to produce more journal issues, panel topics, regional themes, book editions, and course designs devoted to intersectional topics, and foster relationships with scholars outside of our period.
How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I took a Restoration and Eighteenth-Century literature course during my undergraduate career. From the start, I became engrossed in our readings—they were so bizarre. Too raunchy and peculiar to feel familiar, yet strangely edgy and provocative. The texts made me laugh with their wit; they frustrated and alienated me with their representations of people; mostly they left me thinking about the roots of our modernity, and I wanted more. I started reading all of Richardson’s novels for fun (impossible, right?), I consumed all of Burney’s plays and tomes at rapid pace, and I became a quick study in the Anti/Federalist papers, Romantic poetry, and gothic novels. By the time I arrived at graduate school, I declared myself an eighteenth-century scholar because I knew this period would continue to amuse and confound me.
What are you working on right now?
I’m at work on two projects that bring together my interests in feminist theories on violence and precarity, medical humanities, and literary form. First, I’m revising my dissertation, Un/Accountable Enlightenment, into a book. It argues that any biopolitical inquiry into the period demands new literary formal histories beyond the novel and the lyric. I outline the form of the “account” as the ars politica of the eighteenth-century popular imagination—an aesthetic and epistemological form of representing the masses that carries with it deep ethical resonances for our present population crises. The second project, The Law’s Spine, tracks the period’s cultural grooming of doctors as witnesses for, and servants of, Britain’s juridical arm, underwritten by policy. By extension, the book traces too the subsequent narrative strategies that impugned the harm done by this fragile alliance between surgeon and state. Right now, I’m doing research for one of the chapters on Romantic anthropodermic bibliopegy (binding books in human skin), and expanding an early chapter draft on John Milton, marriage law, and gendered metabolism in the late seventeenth century.
How do you incorporate gender or women’s studies in your work?
I admit that I’m a feminist literary critic first, and an eighteenth-century studies scholar second. I think of feminism as praxis—a way of reading and an embodied practice. So even when I am writing chapters that don’t take up gender and sexuality explicitly, I am still doing feminist work because my method of reading, and the questions I ask of our approaches to history and texts, are feminist. For me, this means cultivating a sensitivity to forms of violence and exploitation, and particularly to subtle and insidious forms of harm that often go unregistered or ignored in our histories, and telling the histories that "hurt," to coin Sara Ahmed. That said, much of my work focuses on issues in women’s health and reproduction, women’s political involvement, and the intersections of race, class, and gender in eighteenth-century consumption (economic and food/medical) practices.
What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I'm reading Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger. It's prompting a lot of questions for me about what it means to do feminist literary history, and particularly history of medicine. And, going back to praxis, the book also urges me to redefine what it means to be a feminist within institutions of higher learning.
What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Broadly, I think we need to continue recognizing the work of women (writing, teaching, scholarship) as central rather than a niche category in our journals and anthologies; and we need to advocate continually for adjuncts and graduate students, so many of whom are women in precarious situations economically, professionally, personally. In ASECS I have been inspired by our conversations about making our support of women more intersectional, so I think we need to continue our efforts in making eighteenth-century studies a more diverse field that needs intersectional scholarship to thrive. This means we need to produce more journal issues, panel topics, regional themes, book editions, and course designs devoted to intersectional topics, and foster relationships with scholars outside of our period.
Women's Caucus Member of the Month: Chelsea Phillips
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I started out as a performer, mostly in Shakespeare. I went to an all-women's college (Bryn Mawr), and then helped to found an all-female theatre group (Uncut Pages...get it?), so I spent a lot of time thinking about (and experiencing) the ways that bodies, gender, and texts work together to create meaning. While I took an eighteenth-century satire class with the lovely Peter Briggs, I didn't really encounter eighteenth-century theatre until much later.
During the early days of my PhD work in Theatre, I read an article by Ellen Donkin about Sarah Siddons in which she mentioned that Siddons was pregnant during a performance, and it opened up a whole new aspect of this initial area of interest for me. So I found the eighteenth century through that--through this moment in time where women's reproductive bodies were (even if not universally and not without difficulty) accepted in the context of their professional careers in ways that often seem, sadly, remarkable to us today.
2. What are you working on right now?
A book manuscript about celebrity pregnancy on the eighteenth-century London stage. I consider how the bodies were accommodated within a repertory company from a managerial perspective, how pregnancy intersected with a woman's established celebrity persona and the fictional characters she performed, and how these publicly pregnant bodies may offer us a new ways of thinking about some of the larger cultural movements and ideas we ascribe to the eighteenth century, such as sensibility, the rise of obstetrics as a distinct medical practice, ideas of nature and natural motherhood, etc.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
It's probably pretty self-evident from the answer above---it's everything I do! I'm fortunate in my work to be able to build on the incredible foundations that other scholars have laid in the area of women's studies, in the eighteenth century and beyond--I'm going to resist the urge to start listing people as it would take up the remaining space in this posting.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I have to give a shout-out to Anne Helen Petersen's recent article for Buzzfeed about Kim Kardashian's first pregnancy--it hits on a lot of the questions and concerns I look at in a historical context, and spurs me on to deeper considerations of the ways celebrity bodies might have mattered to audiences then.
I'm also returning to my Shakespeare roots this semester to teach a graduate performance class, so I've been reading Giles Block's Speaking the Speech. I love how invested he is in the smallest details of the way Shakespeare's text communicates with a performer, and how the performer then brings it to life. Beyond being a good book about Shakespeare, there's something deeply poignant right now about thinking through how and why the way we communicate matters so deeply.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Encourage conversation and transparency around the issues we all struggle with, and make sure those conversations intersectional. Discrimination, equitable hiring practices, pay gaps, reproductive health, emotional labor--the only way these systemic problems get any better is if we talk about them, compare experiences, compare solutions, and commit to doing a better job in the future. I also think we've got to be able to have them in person and not just over social media.
I love what a supportive community ASECS is, particularly the Women's Caucus. Continuing and furthering our commitment to accessibility for students, adjuncts, and other non-tenured and non-tenure-track members is the kind of work that benefits us all by enriching our community.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I started out as a performer, mostly in Shakespeare. I went to an all-women's college (Bryn Mawr), and then helped to found an all-female theatre group (Uncut Pages...get it?), so I spent a lot of time thinking about (and experiencing) the ways that bodies, gender, and texts work together to create meaning. While I took an eighteenth-century satire class with the lovely Peter Briggs, I didn't really encounter eighteenth-century theatre until much later.
During the early days of my PhD work in Theatre, I read an article by Ellen Donkin about Sarah Siddons in which she mentioned that Siddons was pregnant during a performance, and it opened up a whole new aspect of this initial area of interest for me. So I found the eighteenth century through that--through this moment in time where women's reproductive bodies were (even if not universally and not without difficulty) accepted in the context of their professional careers in ways that often seem, sadly, remarkable to us today.
2. What are you working on right now?
A book manuscript about celebrity pregnancy on the eighteenth-century London stage. I consider how the bodies were accommodated within a repertory company from a managerial perspective, how pregnancy intersected with a woman's established celebrity persona and the fictional characters she performed, and how these publicly pregnant bodies may offer us a new ways of thinking about some of the larger cultural movements and ideas we ascribe to the eighteenth century, such as sensibility, the rise of obstetrics as a distinct medical practice, ideas of nature and natural motherhood, etc.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
It's probably pretty self-evident from the answer above---it's everything I do! I'm fortunate in my work to be able to build on the incredible foundations that other scholars have laid in the area of women's studies, in the eighteenth century and beyond--I'm going to resist the urge to start listing people as it would take up the remaining space in this posting.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I have to give a shout-out to Anne Helen Petersen's recent article for Buzzfeed about Kim Kardashian's first pregnancy--it hits on a lot of the questions and concerns I look at in a historical context, and spurs me on to deeper considerations of the ways celebrity bodies might have mattered to audiences then.
I'm also returning to my Shakespeare roots this semester to teach a graduate performance class, so I've been reading Giles Block's Speaking the Speech. I love how invested he is in the smallest details of the way Shakespeare's text communicates with a performer, and how the performer then brings it to life. Beyond being a good book about Shakespeare, there's something deeply poignant right now about thinking through how and why the way we communicate matters so deeply.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Encourage conversation and transparency around the issues we all struggle with, and make sure those conversations intersectional. Discrimination, equitable hiring practices, pay gaps, reproductive health, emotional labor--the only way these systemic problems get any better is if we talk about them, compare experiences, compare solutions, and commit to doing a better job in the future. I also think we've got to be able to have them in person and not just over social media.
I love what a supportive community ASECS is, particularly the Women's Caucus. Continuing and furthering our commitment to accessibility for students, adjuncts, and other non-tenured and non-tenure-track members is the kind of work that benefits us all by enriching our community.
Women's Caucus Member of the Month: Mary Beth Harris
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
When I was in undergrad, I took a wonderful course call “Novel Women," which was basically a survey of eighteenth-century women writers. We started Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and worked our way through Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, and Jane Austen. However, even before this excellent education, I had been primed for the eighteenth-century by years of dedicated watching, re-watching, and possible memorization of BBC productions of Jane Austen’s work. Yet, despite this early exposure, I set off for graduate school mistakenly believing I was a modernist and even wrote my Master’s Thesis on modernism (the denial was real and deep). However, when started my doctorate, I landed in an eighteenth-century transatlantic course and immediately rediscovered my enthusiasm for the eighteenth-century: its generic experimentation, its dynamic sprawl, and especially its women writers. I was struck over and over again by how the work of Haywood and many others felt both innovative and yet oddly familiar. I had grown up watching my mom read historical romance novels (and maybe reading some myself) and watching the aforementioned British period dramas with her and my army of Catholic aunts. I was fascinated with how these eighteenth-century women writers were creating, revising, and reconstructing genres and narratives that have so clearly stayed present in our cultural memory, while the women themselves (for the most part) had been pushed out of our cannons and classrooms until the feminist recovery projects. I wanted to be a part of this vibrant field, studying and recovering these vibrant women.
2. What are you working on right now?
My current book project argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through their constructions of the gentleman in novels, and that their versions of the gentleman allowed them to co-opt literary and moral authority. By placing these women writers in dialogue with canonical representatives of the gentleman author, I show that women authors carved out a space for their literary authority in their cultural climate not by overtly opposing their male critics and society’s patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose popularity and desirability is dependent on women’s pens and influence. Ultimately, I hope that my work shifts how we think about the construction of masculinity in the eighteenth-century and expands how we view women writers’ relationship to their male characters, mixed-gendered audience, and male peers.
I am also working on a secondary project exploring how popular British and European genres—especially amatory fiction, romance, and secret history—were transformed in transatlantic contexts. For example, I am working on an essay on how Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) blends the genres of romance and secret history to depict sexual trauma and gender and racial privilege during the Haitian Revolution.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
One of my goals is to rethink the male characters of women writers, and to take these characters seriously in terms of their construction and influence. My current project hinges on committing to viewing the normative masculinity of the gentleman as a performance. If the gentleman’s masculinity—which seeks to present itself as internal, normative, invisible, and natural—can be viewed as a performance, then we can see the ways women were able to revise, infiltrate, and co-opt the literary privileges associated with this position. More broadly, the gentleman is still a hugely popular and desirable cultural figure, whose contours still shape western ideals of masculinity, and I think women writers played a powerful role in making that so.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I have been revisiting two books that inspire me. The first is Kathryn King’s A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. King’s careful attention to Haywood’s identity as a professional author who was conscious and in command of her craft is detailed and wonderful. The second is Kathleen Lubey’s Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760. Not only do I love Lubey’s argument about the pervasive presence of eroticism in eighteenth-century texts and it use to both educate and titillate, but I also admire how she weaves together her readings and evidence to trace this influence across authors who are typically placed in opposition to each other, like Joseph Addison and Eliza Haywood, in creative, thorough, and unexpected ways.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
As the job market and academic culture evolves, so too do the supports women need within these structures. At last year’s ASECS, the Women’s Caucus raised enough money to cover the registration costs for independent and adjunct scholars. I found this very inspiring, and think this is the kind of work and attention we need to cultivate across academia. Now, of course, navigating a changing market and negotiating the status of independent and adjunct scholars, does not only effect women, but I think being vigilant about how to support women in these shifting markets and positions is one of the most immediate concerns we are facing.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
When I was in undergrad, I took a wonderful course call “Novel Women," which was basically a survey of eighteenth-century women writers. We started Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and worked our way through Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, and Jane Austen. However, even before this excellent education, I had been primed for the eighteenth-century by years of dedicated watching, re-watching, and possible memorization of BBC productions of Jane Austen’s work. Yet, despite this early exposure, I set off for graduate school mistakenly believing I was a modernist and even wrote my Master’s Thesis on modernism (the denial was real and deep). However, when started my doctorate, I landed in an eighteenth-century transatlantic course and immediately rediscovered my enthusiasm for the eighteenth-century: its generic experimentation, its dynamic sprawl, and especially its women writers. I was struck over and over again by how the work of Haywood and many others felt both innovative and yet oddly familiar. I had grown up watching my mom read historical romance novels (and maybe reading some myself) and watching the aforementioned British period dramas with her and my army of Catholic aunts. I was fascinated with how these eighteenth-century women writers were creating, revising, and reconstructing genres and narratives that have so clearly stayed present in our cultural memory, while the women themselves (for the most part) had been pushed out of our cannons and classrooms until the feminist recovery projects. I wanted to be a part of this vibrant field, studying and recovering these vibrant women.
2. What are you working on right now?
My current book project argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through their constructions of the gentleman in novels, and that their versions of the gentleman allowed them to co-opt literary and moral authority. By placing these women writers in dialogue with canonical representatives of the gentleman author, I show that women authors carved out a space for their literary authority in their cultural climate not by overtly opposing their male critics and society’s patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose popularity and desirability is dependent on women’s pens and influence. Ultimately, I hope that my work shifts how we think about the construction of masculinity in the eighteenth-century and expands how we view women writers’ relationship to their male characters, mixed-gendered audience, and male peers.
I am also working on a secondary project exploring how popular British and European genres—especially amatory fiction, romance, and secret history—were transformed in transatlantic contexts. For example, I am working on an essay on how Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) blends the genres of romance and secret history to depict sexual trauma and gender and racial privilege during the Haitian Revolution.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
One of my goals is to rethink the male characters of women writers, and to take these characters seriously in terms of their construction and influence. My current project hinges on committing to viewing the normative masculinity of the gentleman as a performance. If the gentleman’s masculinity—which seeks to present itself as internal, normative, invisible, and natural—can be viewed as a performance, then we can see the ways women were able to revise, infiltrate, and co-opt the literary privileges associated with this position. More broadly, the gentleman is still a hugely popular and desirable cultural figure, whose contours still shape western ideals of masculinity, and I think women writers played a powerful role in making that so.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I have been revisiting two books that inspire me. The first is Kathryn King’s A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. King’s careful attention to Haywood’s identity as a professional author who was conscious and in command of her craft is detailed and wonderful. The second is Kathleen Lubey’s Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760. Not only do I love Lubey’s argument about the pervasive presence of eroticism in eighteenth-century texts and it use to both educate and titillate, but I also admire how she weaves together her readings and evidence to trace this influence across authors who are typically placed in opposition to each other, like Joseph Addison and Eliza Haywood, in creative, thorough, and unexpected ways.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
As the job market and academic culture evolves, so too do the supports women need within these structures. At last year’s ASECS, the Women’s Caucus raised enough money to cover the registration costs for independent and adjunct scholars. I found this very inspiring, and think this is the kind of work and attention we need to cultivate across academia. Now, of course, navigating a changing market and negotiating the status of independent and adjunct scholars, does not only effect women, but I think being vigilant about how to support women in these shifting markets and positions is one of the most immediate concerns we are facing.
Women's Caucus Member of the Month: Jade Higa
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
Two words: Laura Engel. Long ago, when I was in my first year of the MA program at Duquesne University, I took a class that Laura taught called “Gothic Bodies.” In it we read a number of eighteenth century Gothic novels and we looked at the function, movement, and significance of bodies in those uncanny spaces. Although I already had a deep love of literature in general, Laura and her own passion for eighteenth-century literature and culture helped me realize how thrilling it could be to explore this time period with a critical eye. As I’ve continued in my career, other eighteenth-century scholars doing incredible work continue to be the fuel behind my own love of this delightfully bizarre era.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’m currently finishing up an article-length version of the paper I gave at ASECS 2017 that reads Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park using Sarah Ahmed’s theories on queer comfort. In it, I argue that the (greatly unsatisfying) heteronormative ending is not a failure in the text; rather, it is an opening that exposes the queer potential present between Mary Crawford and Fanny Price. And I suggest that we might use this theory to look at other seemingly heteronormative eighteenth-century novels. I’m also putting together a book proposal for a project that examines bisexuality and female desire within eighteenth century figures.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
The roots of my work are built out of questions about female desire. This foundation can branch off into multiple directions and certainly includes a deep love of queer theory, and my work consistently addresses the concepts of women and sexuality as well as the complexities and contradictions that exist within that intersection.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I just finished an article by Mary Beth Harris entitled “Upsetting the Balance: Exposing the Myth of Masculine Virtue and Desire in Eliza Haywood’s Philidore and Placentia” which was published in the most recent edition of The Eighteenth Century. It’s a brilliant reading of Haywood’s work and her ability to manipulate concepts of Enlightenment masculinity and homosocial relationships. Harris’ playful language and fascinating argument are uplifting, and her article inspires me to keep going with my own work.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
This is a tough question because so much of what we need for women in academia involves systemic changes and paradigm shifts. My first thought is to create as many opportunities as possible to support scholarship by and about queer women and trans women.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
Two words: Laura Engel. Long ago, when I was in my first year of the MA program at Duquesne University, I took a class that Laura taught called “Gothic Bodies.” In it we read a number of eighteenth century Gothic novels and we looked at the function, movement, and significance of bodies in those uncanny spaces. Although I already had a deep love of literature in general, Laura and her own passion for eighteenth-century literature and culture helped me realize how thrilling it could be to explore this time period with a critical eye. As I’ve continued in my career, other eighteenth-century scholars doing incredible work continue to be the fuel behind my own love of this delightfully bizarre era.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’m currently finishing up an article-length version of the paper I gave at ASECS 2017 that reads Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park using Sarah Ahmed’s theories on queer comfort. In it, I argue that the (greatly unsatisfying) heteronormative ending is not a failure in the text; rather, it is an opening that exposes the queer potential present between Mary Crawford and Fanny Price. And I suggest that we might use this theory to look at other seemingly heteronormative eighteenth-century novels. I’m also putting together a book proposal for a project that examines bisexuality and female desire within eighteenth century figures.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
The roots of my work are built out of questions about female desire. This foundation can branch off into multiple directions and certainly includes a deep love of queer theory, and my work consistently addresses the concepts of women and sexuality as well as the complexities and contradictions that exist within that intersection.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I just finished an article by Mary Beth Harris entitled “Upsetting the Balance: Exposing the Myth of Masculine Virtue and Desire in Eliza Haywood’s Philidore and Placentia” which was published in the most recent edition of The Eighteenth Century. It’s a brilliant reading of Haywood’s work and her ability to manipulate concepts of Enlightenment masculinity and homosocial relationships. Harris’ playful language and fascinating argument are uplifting, and her article inspires me to keep going with my own work.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
This is a tough question because so much of what we need for women in academia involves systemic changes and paradigm shifts. My first thought is to create as many opportunities as possible to support scholarship by and about queer women and trans women.
Women's Caucus Member of the Month: Professor Rebekah Mitsein
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
Despite the fact that my favorite movie when I was a kid was an animated adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, I had no idea that I would end up in the eighteenth century when I started graduate school. I thought I was going to study postmodern theory. But enough postmodern thinkers used the Enlightenment as a jumping-off point that I thought I’d better take a look at it, and I got stuck here. It turned out that writers in the eighteenth century were asking the same questions I was: What justifies calling something “knowledge?” How do discrete experiences or observations get abstracted into universal claims? What role does imaginative writing play in producing truth? But their responses didn't fit into the tidy narratives I had always been told about the era. So, I became interested in a new question: What can we learn from the awkward bits, historical or literary, that don’t fit into our intellectual and cultural mythologies?
2. What are you working on right now?
My current book project looks at how African self-representation influenced early eighteenth-century British literature and shaped Enlightenment impressions of the world. Travel writers and authors of imaginative works used Africa as a kind of testing ground for burgeoning scientific and philosophical ideas. But in the process, they integrated African knowledge, narratives, and culture into their texts. I hope shining light on this will help us continue to re-envision the eighteenth-century as less as the brainchild of European Cartesian subjects and more as an era that was globally produced.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
One of my goals is to bring more attention to the fact that eighteenth-century travelers and writers had interpersonal, economic, and political connections with African women, and that these women played a crucial role in shaping how they made sense the world. For example, the West Africans that Europeans and Arabs traded with were as likely to be women as men, and women were often European travelers’ most powerful cultural brokers in Africa. A chapter of my current project maps out how the historical women of the Solomonic Dynasty and the exceptional women of the Ethiopian literary tradition (like the Queen ofSheba) dictated the terms that Europeans used to represent East Africa.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner’s translation of Galawdewos’s The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros (Princeton UP, 2015). It’s a seventeenth-century biography of a woman who left her husband to become a nun and help lead Ethiopia’s resistance against Jesuit conversion. It blows the truisms we stereotypically use to historicize both African women and African literature out of the water.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I still see a lot of women internalizing the ideas that in order to fit into academia we need to be hyper-vigilant about the way we talk, the way we dress, the way we look, the way we engage with the world, and that anything less than perfection will constitute a one-way trip to failure. I’m so grateful that the women who have mentored me have taken an active stand against that message. But I think slaying that dragon is going to be a multi-generational task.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
Despite the fact that my favorite movie when I was a kid was an animated adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, I had no idea that I would end up in the eighteenth century when I started graduate school. I thought I was going to study postmodern theory. But enough postmodern thinkers used the Enlightenment as a jumping-off point that I thought I’d better take a look at it, and I got stuck here. It turned out that writers in the eighteenth century were asking the same questions I was: What justifies calling something “knowledge?” How do discrete experiences or observations get abstracted into universal claims? What role does imaginative writing play in producing truth? But their responses didn't fit into the tidy narratives I had always been told about the era. So, I became interested in a new question: What can we learn from the awkward bits, historical or literary, that don’t fit into our intellectual and cultural mythologies?
2. What are you working on right now?
My current book project looks at how African self-representation influenced early eighteenth-century British literature and shaped Enlightenment impressions of the world. Travel writers and authors of imaginative works used Africa as a kind of testing ground for burgeoning scientific and philosophical ideas. But in the process, they integrated African knowledge, narratives, and culture into their texts. I hope shining light on this will help us continue to re-envision the eighteenth-century as less as the brainchild of European Cartesian subjects and more as an era that was globally produced.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
One of my goals is to bring more attention to the fact that eighteenth-century travelers and writers had interpersonal, economic, and political connections with African women, and that these women played a crucial role in shaping how they made sense the world. For example, the West Africans that Europeans and Arabs traded with were as likely to be women as men, and women were often European travelers’ most powerful cultural brokers in Africa. A chapter of my current project maps out how the historical women of the Solomonic Dynasty and the exceptional women of the Ethiopian literary tradition (like the Queen ofSheba) dictated the terms that Europeans used to represent East Africa.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner’s translation of Galawdewos’s The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros (Princeton UP, 2015). It’s a seventeenth-century biography of a woman who left her husband to become a nun and help lead Ethiopia’s resistance against Jesuit conversion. It blows the truisms we stereotypically use to historicize both African women and African literature out of the water.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I still see a lot of women internalizing the ideas that in order to fit into academia we need to be hyper-vigilant about the way we talk, the way we dress, the way we look, the way we engage with the world, and that anything less than perfection will constitute a one-way trip to failure. I’m so grateful that the women who have mentored me have taken an active stand against that message. But I think slaying that dragon is going to be a multi-generational task.
Women's Caucus Member of the Month: Tracey Hutching-Goetz
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
My earliest interest in eighteenth-century studies was in fashion: when I was sixteen, I spent a summer sewing myself an eighteenth-century gown. Two years later, at Kenyon College, I had the pleasure of taking classes with Dr. Jim Carson, who introduced me to eighteenth-century fiction and later became my honors thesis advisor. I immediately became hooked by the uncanniness of eighteenth-century fictions. I was fascinated with how eighteenth-century literature was simultaneously familiarly modern and utterly strange. In particular, I loved the heterogeneity of eighteenth-century literature, the way it blended sex with sentiment, pleasure with didacticism, and “formal realism” with absurd plotting.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’m currently working on my dissertation, Touchy Subjects: An Eighteenth-Century Anatomy of Haptic Sensation. My dissertation recuperates the complexity of the sense of touch—and by extension, the other senses—in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Organized around four forms of touching (nerves, skin, hands, and invisible hands), Touchy Subjects sutures together the experience of embodiment and the narrative and epistemological structures of the period.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Even when gender is not the primary subject of my work, I would describe my research as broadly informed by feminist scholarship, especially Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling. At the moment, gender and women studies are at the forefront of my work: I am currently writing the third chapter of my dissertation, “Hands,” which focuses on the fetishization of women’s gloves and hands in eighteenth-century Britain. In “Hands,” I bring together material culture and literary representations to demonstrate a shift in the meaning of gloves: traditionally, gloves connoted elite social status and authority, but, in the eighteenth century, gloves come to primarily signify femininity. In my chapter, I argue that this process was accomplished through pervasive eroticized representations of women’s gloving practices, and that the associated rise of the gloved populace during the period can be understood as a material manifestation of a changing cultural attitude toward the sense of touch.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
As a part of my current research on women’s gloving practices, I recently revisited Norbert Elias’ The History of Manners (the first volume of The Civilizing Process). Rereading Elias, I was impressed by both his analysis of early modern habitus, as well as his ability to draw links between emotional experience, embodied practices, and large-scale political changes. When I feel stuck, I’ve always found reading something out of discipline or field can help provide a new perspective or framework for whatever topic I’m working on. The History of Manners helped me to rethink the evidence, structure, and stakes of my argument.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I think it’s great that the Women’s Caucus decided to restart its mentoring program last year, and I would love to see that program expanded to encompass ASECS affiliate conferences. Regional conferences are often the first conference experience that graduate students have and, as such, it’s a crucial time to welcome and engage with women as they enter the next stage in their professionalization. I think it’s important to provide women, especially newcomers to the profession, with both formal and informal opportunities to meet other women in the field.
1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
My earliest interest in eighteenth-century studies was in fashion: when I was sixteen, I spent a summer sewing myself an eighteenth-century gown. Two years later, at Kenyon College, I had the pleasure of taking classes with Dr. Jim Carson, who introduced me to eighteenth-century fiction and later became my honors thesis advisor. I immediately became hooked by the uncanniness of eighteenth-century fictions. I was fascinated with how eighteenth-century literature was simultaneously familiarly modern and utterly strange. In particular, I loved the heterogeneity of eighteenth-century literature, the way it blended sex with sentiment, pleasure with didacticism, and “formal realism” with absurd plotting.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’m currently working on my dissertation, Touchy Subjects: An Eighteenth-Century Anatomy of Haptic Sensation. My dissertation recuperates the complexity of the sense of touch—and by extension, the other senses—in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Organized around four forms of touching (nerves, skin, hands, and invisible hands), Touchy Subjects sutures together the experience of embodiment and the narrative and epistemological structures of the period.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Even when gender is not the primary subject of my work, I would describe my research as broadly informed by feminist scholarship, especially Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling. At the moment, gender and women studies are at the forefront of my work: I am currently writing the third chapter of my dissertation, “Hands,” which focuses on the fetishization of women’s gloves and hands in eighteenth-century Britain. In “Hands,” I bring together material culture and literary representations to demonstrate a shift in the meaning of gloves: traditionally, gloves connoted elite social status and authority, but, in the eighteenth century, gloves come to primarily signify femininity. In my chapter, I argue that this process was accomplished through pervasive eroticized representations of women’s gloving practices, and that the associated rise of the gloved populace during the period can be understood as a material manifestation of a changing cultural attitude toward the sense of touch.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
As a part of my current research on women’s gloving practices, I recently revisited Norbert Elias’ The History of Manners (the first volume of The Civilizing Process). Rereading Elias, I was impressed by both his analysis of early modern habitus, as well as his ability to draw links between emotional experience, embodied practices, and large-scale political changes. When I feel stuck, I’ve always found reading something out of discipline or field can help provide a new perspective or framework for whatever topic I’m working on. The History of Manners helped me to rethink the evidence, structure, and stakes of my argument.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I think it’s great that the Women’s Caucus decided to restart its mentoring program last year, and I would love to see that program expanded to encompass ASECS affiliate conferences. Regional conferences are often the first conference experience that graduate students have and, as such, it’s a crucial time to welcome and engage with women as they enter the next stage in their professionalization. I think it’s important to provide women, especially newcomers to the profession, with both formal and informal opportunities to meet other women in the field.