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.

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