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.
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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.
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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.

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