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8/9/2024 Miriam Wallace 1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies?
It was really an accident. I started out intending to focus on modern/postmodern and formally innovative fiction, with particular interest in Virginia Woolf, French feminism, African American writers, and the British, French, and Latin American novel. Helene Moglen taught a 2- quarter class on eighteenth-century literature, and among other works, we read Tristram Shandy—which the rest of the class mostly hated for its misogyny. And I kept thinking—feminist theory must have something more interesting to say about this novel beyond that—and I sort of fell into the eighteenth century from there. These were the days when “theory” was just starting to creep into eighteenth-century studies with a lot of backlash (remember the keynote that blamed Foucault and feminism for ruining the field?). It was the Women’s Caucus and also a few panels I presented on that were doing queer approaches (this was pre-Lesbian and Gay Caucus) where I started to feel as though I could belong here. 2. What are you working on right now? I’m a big believer in happy accidents! I’m on my first research leave in ten years right now, hoping to finish off a book on how common folk came to public political and legal speech in the period. While on fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library exploring satirical prints of public speakers, I stumbled on an image I couldn’t make sense of (the accident). Eventually it took me to the Garrat elections, which were a rowdy, comic spoof on the London mayoral elections complete with boozing, costumes, and absurd candidates, including the ‘anomalous’ bodied “Sir” Jeffry Dunstan, aka Mayor of Garrat. I’m delighted that my first essay on Dunstan is out in Making Stars: Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, thanks to Kristina Straub and Nora Nachumi. And Dunstan has led me into disability studies and health humanities, so more accidents. 3. What's one example of the role played by the Women's Caucus in your professional development? Mentorship: When I was figuring this profession out, there was a lot of talk about mentorship—what a mentor looks like, who had one and who didn’t, etc. What I’ve learned since is that mentorship comes in many different forms—and the Women’s Caucus was where I found mentors not just in senior colleagues who talked to me at lunch, included me on panels, and most importantly, agreed to serve as tenure reviewers—but also lateral mentorship in colleagues at the same stage, at other small teaching colleges, the ones you could ask those embarrassing questions that you thought you should know the answer to, but didn’t. And I also want to point to the invitation to mentorship the Caucus represents—I’ve really valued the conversations with graduate students or rising colleagues, from whom I learn so much. It’s been a real pleasure to find I sometimes have helpful experience to share or can help promote the great work of someone else—and since I don’t have graduate students, these are important conversations that help me stay in tune with new directions I might not know about otherwise. Professional panels: They have helped me so much—and really been the first and for a while the only place where I could get actual help with that whole iceberg that is our profession—beyond the teaching or the scholarship. One of the best pointers I ever got was to build time for myself into my day and rather than apologizing or explaining: “Oh, that’s my X time, but I suppose I can reschedule” to just say: “That doesn’t work for me; let’s find another time.” No apology; no excuse; no putting my life second. 4. You have served on the Women’s Caucus Executive Board. What's one aspect of Women's Caucus governance, prizes, or procedures that has changed over the years? When I was co-chair with Kate Jensen, as she cycled out, I took all the documents that we were passing from one chair to the next and created a big binder that I shared with the next chair—with sections on history, prize committees and processes, notes from business meetings and reports. It made for a heavy suitcase the year I passed it on, but it did feel good to pass such a material ‘baton.’ How very old school and analog! Back in the day, we tried to stagger co-chair terms (as we do now, I think), but we also had a rule that co-chairs needed to be from different fields. This tended in practice to mean English and French, but it also meant sometimes we had Art Historians or Historians. Although it’s sometimes been difficult to find a chair, and we know there are other important perspectives beyond disciplinary training, I do think for an inter- and multidisciplinary organization, it’s worth thinking about why we might want to consider a range of expertise. 5. What is one recent book, article, or other media selection that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? I’m got a huge stack of ‘to read’ books right now, but meaning to get back to Alice Kuzniar’s The Birth of Homeopathy Out of the Spirit of Romanticism. I tend to keep it secret, but I was raised as a 4th generation homeopath, so the principles she traces (law of similars, minimal dose, etc.) are super familiar, but the connection to late eighteenth century thought about human nature, physiology and spirituality, and a kind of “One health” connectedness between the human and non-human world is resonating with a lot of things I want to think through. What’s great about the book is how easily she moves across English and German language and culture, and that it’s more a kind of intellectual history than a book that seeks to prove for or against homeopathy as a medical practice and tradition. 6. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS? Well, the obvious thing to point to is that the pandemic as well as efforts to really reckon with historic and systemic racism have highlighted a lot of pain points even for those of us with stable positions. As someone who is childless by choice, I’ve watched colleagues with children really struggle, particularly when we went fully online. I guess I’m an optimist—and although I know a lot of “women’s leadership” discourse can be a bit off-putting, I do think that the more of us-- “women-people”—particularly those who are under-represented or first-in-family, take on a variety of leadership roles, the better. I’ve just finished six years as Division Chair of Humanities at my institution, and though I’m glad to be done right now (Florida!), I was surprised at how fulfilling it was some days—because you really can make things better for a colleague, a student, an office staff person. Sometimes it’s just that you hear them, but sometimes you can get someone what they need—money, time, a good match for a promotion review, flexible work modalities.
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. 8/9/2024 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. 8/9/2024 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. 8/9/2024 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. 8/9/2024 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. 8/9/2024 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. 8/9/2024 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. 8/9/2024 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. 8/9/2024 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. |
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