Participants

This members of the seminar will be chosen by competitive application. There will be 16 participants, made up of those who teach American undergraduate students and qualifying independent scholars. Two slots in this seminar are reserved for graduate student applicants.

Toby R. Benis is Professor of English at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, MO. She is the author of Romantic Diasporas: French Emigres, British Convicts, and Jews (Palgrave, 2009) and Romanticism on the Road: the Marginal Gains of Wordsworth's Homeless (Macmillan, 2000), as well as articles in journals including The Wordsworth Circle, European Romantic Review, and Criticism. In 2007, she was guest editor of a special issue of The Wordsworth Circle honoring the scholarly achievements of Professor Karl Kroeber, with whom she studied before earning her doctorate from Columbia University in 1996. She currently is working on a book project on mobility and femininity in the texts and reception of Austen's novels, as well as a monograph on appropriations of the Restoration and early eighteenth century by Romantic-era writers and political theorists.

Dr. Andrea Coldwell Cabus is Assistant Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina. She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. Her interests include the history of the novel, reception theory, and literary adaptations.

Hannah Doherty is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, specializing in the literature of the long eighteenth century. She is currently at work on her dissertation, "The Myth of Minerva: Publishing, Popular Fiction, and the Rise of the Novel," which she looks forward to finishing in 2012-13 with the support of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Hannah's research focuses on the novels of the Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction publisher of the Romantic period; more broadly, she is interested in genre and in the relationship between publishing, material culture, and literary aesthetics. Hannah is a contributor to the Pickering & Chatto collection Romantic Women Writers Reviewed.

Brigdet Draxler Bridget Draxler is a first-year assistant professor of English and director of an interdisciplinary writing program at Monmouth College, a residential liberal arts college in Monmouth, IL. Her current role at the college allows her to support student speaking and writing skills by helping faculty develop innovative curriculum within the college's core curriculum. While earning a graduate degree in eighteenth-century literature at the University of Iowa, Bridget designed a course that allowed undergraduate students to conduct primary research for a multimedia mobile app called "City of Lit". Bridget is currently developing a similar course at Monmouth called "Local Heroes," which draws on archival research and digital technology to celebrate civic leaders in the Monmouth community.

Jenni Frangos is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she teaches courses in eighteenth-century British literature, the novel, editing, and Jane Austen. She has published essays on Aphra Behn, Anne Lister, Delarivier Manley, and eighteenth-century ghost stories; has edited a collection on Transatlantic pedagogy; and serves as editor for the academic journal, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. Her research explores what Eve Sedgwick has called "perverse histories and local possibilities" by tracing available tropes for understanding and enacting sexual desire between women in eighteenth-century British print culture

Erin Goss is Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University. She received her PhD from Emory University in 2005 with a dissertation on revelation in 19th-century literature. Her research interests include 18th- and 19th-century British literature and intellectual history, environmental thought, and theories of the body. Her current work focuses on 18th- and 19th-century female poets' responses to their literary peers and precedents.

Olivera Jokic is Assistant Professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY. Her scholarly interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and histiography, European colonialism and colonial documentation, the history of writing, and gender.

Lisa Kasmer is Associate Professor of English at Clark University. She specializes in gender studies and women's writing in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Her first book Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760-1830, (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012) considers how women writers pushed the generic and social limits of narrated history to carve out a space to participate in civic life. Her current book project examines the intersection of the trauma of British colonialism, imperialism, and shifting gender identities. She has recently published on Mary Shelley and Jane Austen.

Misty Krueger is a visiting assistant professor of British Literature at University of Maine at Farmington, where she teaches Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, in addition to Shakespeare. She has published essays on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama in journals such as Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research and New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century. She is currently writing a manuscript on revenge in Restoration and early eighteenth-century tragic drama, and she is formulating a project that examines the teaching of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey as a transitional text that spans late 18th-century fiction and Romantic literature.

John C. Leffel is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Born in Tennessee and raised in Michigan, he received his BA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and his MA from New York University. He is currently completing his dissertation, tentatively entitled Gambling on Empire: Early British India and the Art of Speculation. His articles on Jane Austen have appeared in the journals Studies in the Novel and Persuasions, as well as in the edited collection Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780-1860 (2009). His essay on colonial wealth and cultural difference in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) is forthcoming in European Romantic Review.

Andrea Rehn is an assistant professor of Victorian Literature at Whittier College in Los Angeles. She received her PhD from Cornell in 2007, where her dissertation focused on the literary, legal, and nonfictional representations of freebooter imperialists in nineteenth-century British texts about Southeast Asia. She is currently at work on a book about the articulation of sovereignty and piracy in imperial romances. Her publications include articles on Isabella Bird, travel narratives, and Conrad's Lord Jim.

Daniel Schierenbeck is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Missouri. He has published on Romantic-era literature in journals including Studies in Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net, and the Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commonsi. His essays have been included in Enlightening Romance, Romancing the Enlightenment: British Novels from 1750 to 1832 and On Theorizing Romanticism and Other Essays on the State of Scholarship Today. Most recently, he authored the entries on the adventure novel, Barbara Hofland, and Mary Sherwood for Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Literature. He is currently at work on a project that examines impact of conservative religious discourse on the cultural politics and aesthetics of early nineteenth-century British literature.

Danielle Spratt is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture at California State University, Northridge. She received her PhD in May 2011 from Fordham University. Her work has appeared in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Chawton House Library's The Female Spectator, and the Scriblerian. Danielle is currently working on two projects, one about how literature from the long eighteenth century critiques the rhetoric of new science through images of disempowered male bodies, and another on literary discourses about social justice and the emergence of cultural philanthropy.

Laura Thomason is Assistant Professor of English at Macon State College in Macon, Georgia. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century women's construction of identity through writing. Her book Intelligent Wives in Eighteenth-Century Life and Literature is currently under consideration, and she is working on an article titled "Where is the World in Fantomina," examining Haywood's manipulation of the public/private boundary in that text.

Cheryl A. Wilson (Ph.D. University of Delaware) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Baltimore. Her research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers, performance, and gender studies. She is the author of Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel (Pickering & Chatto, June 2012) and Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge UP, 2009), editor of Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Palgrave, 2008), and co-editor of Michael Field and Their World (with Margaret D. Stetz, Rivendale, 2007).

Jodi L. Wyett , Associate Professor of English and Director of Gender and Diversity Studies at Xavier University, earned her B.A. (1990) at DePauw University and both her M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (1999) at Wayne State University. She teaches eighteenth-century British literature, women's literature, feminist theory, gender studies, film, and the novel. Her publications, including articles on the novels of Frances Brooke and on lapdogs in eighteenth-century literature and culture, have appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction and The Eighteenth-Century Novel. Her current research focuses on eighteenth-century women readers. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband and their two children