Research Areas
Interests
My research has long focused on the materiality of eighteenth-century literary culture, and specifically on literary sociability as it can be reconstructed through archival traces in correspondences, manuscript books, and printed texts. I write about how authorship was constructed and experienced, especially by women; about manuscript creation and exchange within literary coteries; about Bluestocking women and their networks; about mid-century writers; and about novels and domestic travel writing.
I discuss my Bluestocking interests on a podcast episode of the WPHP Monthly Mercury, and feature my manuscript verse miscellany research on the Folger's Collation.
Current Projects
Reader Creations: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Poetry Miscellanies is the first book-length study of the widespread eighteenth-century practice of creating a personal poetry miscellany. In a time when poetry was an everyday means of communicating political opinions, marking important life events, telling jokes, and expressing deep feelings, individuals living in country villages and bustling cities encountered verse in every newspaper and magazine and regularly wrote it themselves to mark important life occasions. Whether they were schoolchildren, retired men, adolescent girls, or middle-class professionals, and whether they did so for private reflection, to show off their accomplishments, to entertain others, or for the benefit of posterity, they carefully selected, copied, arranged, and decorated poems in blank paperbooks.
Drawing on theories and methodologies of book history, history of reading, manuscript studies, and media studies, Reader Creations considers what these books have to tell us about the participatory literary culture of the day, about reading habits and popular tastes, and about how individuals negotiated their identities through the curation of a poetry book of their own. This study is based on extensive archival research analyzing over two hundred verse miscellanies created between 1700 and 1820.
Digital Projects
[In Progress] Together with students Linara Kolosov, Rebekah Stuive, and Angela Wachowich, I am editing a portion of the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu with the famous naturalist and collector the Duchess of Portland as part of the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online project. This multi-faceted international digital humanities collaboration is producing the first-ever scholarly edition of the 8000+ letters between Montagu, known in her time as the “Queen of the Bluestockings,” and members of her extensive social circle of Bluestocking women, family members, leading authors, and public figures.
Manuscript Verse Miscellanies, 1700-1820, launched in 2021, was developed with lead editor Angela Wachowich, the programming and design team of the SFU Digitial Humanities Innovation Lab, and a number of research assistants. This open-access, searchable database describes hundreds of unique manuscript poetry books created by often-obscure individuals using verse copied from magazines or printed collections along with their own compositions or those of members of their own social networks. Carefully organized, often beautiful, educational, and entertaining, each of these manuscript books has a story to tell. The database includes bibliographical features, layout, and contents, and where known, information about compilers and literary networks (coteries).
The Sarah Wilmot, Forgotten Bluestocking exhibit portrays selected manuscript poetry of a previously unknown Bluestocking writer, Sarah Wilmot, whose manuscript poetry is preserved in the Chawton House Library. Seven Wilmot poems were transcribed, annotated, illustrated, and critically analyzed by SFU undergraduate students; the site was created and edited in 2019 with the assistance of Anne Cheng, Rawia Inaim, and Angela Wachowich.