Ghent University

Post-Doc, English

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

About

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Research on Authorship as Performance project (www.rap.ugent.be) at Ghent University as well as co-editor of the electronic journal, Authorship (www.authorship.ugent.be), after receiving a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in September 2009.

I am currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled, "Ecologies of Character: Correspondence, Print, and Mediation, 1735-1810." In this study I explore the pivotal role that the publication of familiar correspondence (letters written to family members and friends) played in the mediation of identity in eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain. I argue that the printing of familiar letters can serve as a model for the formulation and circulation of “character” – a mix of personal qualities, public stature, and moral reputation – in this period more generally. To that end I mobilize the full range of the term “character,” a range that has frequently been neglected by modern literary study’s penchant for fictional characters in novels and on the stage. Instead, I discuss character as a conceptual and material matrix that mediated between individuals and groups, personal and social identities, across a broad range of media forms and technologies. Published familiar correspondence replicated the dynamics of these media ecologies (a term I use to denote the complex interactions of media and their users) and accordingly offers a particularly effective case study through which to investigate the central importance of an “intermedial” character to the formulation of personal and group identities. In the book’s individual chapters, I analyze the publication histories and reception of a wide range of letters to illustrate the ways in which remediation of a writer’s personal character could contribute to the formulation of such group identities as a national, racial, or gendered character. I discuss, for example, how Anna Barbauld edited and reframed Samuel Richardson’s letters in such a way that his personal character came to guarantee the morality of his fictional characters and thus underwrote the novelist’s Romantic rise as father of the modern British novel, while I trace semiotic connections between racial character, a person’s “hand” (the literal appendage as well as a person’s handwriting) and the economics of slavery in a chapter on Ignatius Sancho’s letters to illustrate the difficulties Afro-Britons faced in asserting that they, too, could possess character. In thus articulating the publication of familiar letters with the period’s ecologies of character, my study opens new avenues through which we can explore the nexus of writing, reading, and print out of which identities emerged in eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain.

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