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.

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