Volume 2.2 (September 2012): Open Access
Special Issue: The State of The Profession
SCHOLARSHIP:
“Supporting Women Scholars: How to get Things Done in Hard Times” by Mona Narain
During the Women’s Caucus luncheon at the 2011 ASECS spring meeting in Vancouver, several caucus participants exchanged anecdotes about how the recession shaped their professional trajectory in significant ways and traded advice on ways to cope with challenges. Continue reading →.
“Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Class in the ‘Hard Times: Women Scholars and the Dynamics of Economic Recession”’ by Christine Clark-Evans
For the 2012 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting in San Antonio, Texas, when the Women’s Caucus had decided collectively the topics for our eighteenth-century research panel and the professional interest panel…Miriam L. Wallace suggested that… Linda Zionowski (English, Ohio University) and I (French and Francophone Studies, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies, Pennsylvania State University) submit a combined title and panel proposal. This is an account of the roundtable and my perspective on intellectual and ethical questions of race, gender, and class in local settings and the wider context. Continue reading →.
“Getting it Done” by Lisa A. Freeman
The last five years have been particularly hard on the humanities and on the funding of the humanities within university structures. One of the most troubling developments has been the emergence of haves and have-nots, as wealthier universities have continued to acquire large databases to facilitate humanities research and poorer universities scramble to provide even basic library resources. Continue reading →.
“Hard Times: Women Scholars and the Dynamics of Economic Recession” by Julie Candler Hayes
When I think about “the dynamics of economic recession,” my thoughts turn not just to women scholars, but to all scholars in programs that are threatened with cutbacks, to institutions, and of course to students. The deprofessionalization of academic labor and the increasing reliance on contingent faculty are part of this picture. Continue reading →.
“Cultivating Resources in Hard Times” by Catherine Ingrassia
Last April at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, I was on two panels that each dealt with the current “hard times” we are experiencing in higher education. Those challenges are keenly felt by scholars and teachers in the (often already feminized) humanities and especially, I would argue, by female faculty members of all ranks. Continue reading →.
“A Deeply-Felt (and Somewhat Revised) Rant: Women, Children and Funding in the Ivory Tower” by Nora Nachumi
What follows is considerably more precise and well-documented than what I said when I spoke on last year’s roundtable. You see, as I sat there, listening to incredibly helpful advice from junior and senior scholars alike, I felt overwhelmed with frustration. Continue reading →.
“Staffing: ‘The Part-Time Crisis in the Classroom’” by Judith Bailey Slagle
In 2008, my Department of English reached such a crisis in the ratio of part-time faculty to full time that as department chair I decided it was time to involve the university President. With only 25 tenured/tenure-track English faculty, and several of them on administrative assignments, along with a rising number of majors, we were covering 62% of our 1000-2000-level English courses with part-time faculty—often barely qualified to be in the classroom. Continue reading →.
“Funding, Grants, Hiring, Programs: Sharing Advice on How to get Things Done in HardTimes” by Srividhya Swaminathan
The current state of the academy does not favor the humanities with regards to funding. We have a limited number of lucrative fellowships to pursue and our grant opportunities border on nonexistent. A probable reason for the limited grant funding relates directly to the nature of research in the humanities. Continue reading →.
“Hard Times: Women Scholars and the Dynamics of Economic Recession” by Linda Zionkowski
While straitened budgets and shrinking resources present difficulties for all of us within the university system, some of the most vulnerable people affected are graduate students. Occupying a liminal space as apprentices within the profession, students enrolled in master’s and doctoral programs often find themselves facing a situation in which opportunities for professional development have become occasions for exploitation. Continue reading →.
REVIEWS:
Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810: Migrant Fictions, by Eve Tavor Bannet, reviewed by Dustin E. Hannum
In Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810: Migrant Fictions, Eve Tavor Bannet explores the history of a number of texts consumed and recirculated by readers on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within the context of Bannet’s three-part study, the book’s subtitle, Migrant Fictions, thus refers to a number of interrelated phenomena that characterized the dynamic, frequently volatile transatlantic print culture of the period. Continue reading →.
Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s, edited by Susan Carlile, reviewed by Emily Bowles
Susan Carlile’s Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s brings contributions from some of the most influential scholars of eighteenth-century women’s writing together with newer voices in a collection that assigns new value to a literary period often neglected or rendered as a period of stagnancy in between the groundbreaking 1740s and the more formally experimental 1770s. Continue reading →.
Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, edited by Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs, reviewed by Judy A. Hayden
Assembling a text such as Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century is never an easy task. In this regard, the editors, Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs, deserve kudos for their efforts. In drawing on scholars from a number of different countries and disciplines, Nelson and Burroughs offer a multiplicity of views and ideas on pedagogical aspects of female playwrights in this historical period. Continue reading →.
Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson, reviewed by Elizabeth J. Mathews
In his intriguing book, Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, James P. Carson reads Romantic novels in a biographical, historical, and political context, exploring the representation of crowds. He reveals the ambivalence of Romantic authors on issues of gender, popular culture, and social control. By focusing primarily on the masses rather than the individual and on sound rather than vision, the book offers a fresh perspective on the social and political issues at stake in late-eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century fiction. Continue reading →.
Stuart Women Playwrights, 1613-1713, by Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, reviewed by R. Mark Jackson
The scope of this short and captivating book is tighter than the title suggests: not all genres of plays by Stuart women but rather tragedies and tragicomedies exclusively; not manuscripts but only published plays, whether staged or not; and, finally, not the many translations and adaptations from classical and continental sources but only original works. Cuder-Domínguez’s intention, defended in a pithy and remarkably straightforward first chapter, is to illumine a dark recess of feminist criticism, and that is the relative neglect of two genres that many women of the period attempted. Continue reading →.
ASK APHRA:
MA to PhD
Dear Aphra,
I am in an M.A. program and love what I’m doing. I want to go on to a Ph.D. program, but my advisor is discouraging me from applying. What should I do? Continue reading →.
Publication after Tenure
Dear Aphra,
I have been focused on getting tenure for so long that, now once I have it, I’m unsure of how much power I have. What are my real freedoms once I get tenure? Can I really say no to anything? Can I really publish whatever I want? Continue reading →.
Finding Readers
Dear Aphra,
As a new and evolving scholar of the eighteenth century, I am always looking for ways to improve my writing. I have been told that having other people review my work is a good way to improve my writing, but I have questions about this process… Continue reading →.
Volume 2.1 (March 2012): Open Access
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
Our first anniversary has allowed us to consider many relevant and complex questions about the intersections between a traditional academic journal and web formats. Notions of contemporary access intersect with questions about modes and methods of access for writers of the long eighteenth century, especially women writers. Continue reading →.
SCHOLARSHIP:
“Fatally Enjoy’d: Rape, Resilience, and the Accessibility in Aphra Behn’s The Dumb Virgin” by Emily Bowles
As an employee of a Sexual Assault Service Provider (SASP), I have read police reports that express the same sense of silent struggle communicated by Aphra Behn’s narrator in her description of a mute woman’s fight against her overzealous lover’s sexual advances. Continue reading →.
“At The Precipice of Community: Feral Openness and the Work of Mary Robinson” by Anne Milne
In this paper I cast Mary Darby Robinson (1758-1800) as a feral figure and suggest that a consideration of the feral is central to an understanding of both her life and work. Continue reading →
“The Limits of Genre: Women and ‘History’ in Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph and Elizabeth Griffith’s The History of Lady Barton” by Kaley Kramer
Ideas of property, history, and subjectivity converge in Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and Elizabeth Griffith’s The History of Lady Barton (1771). Both novels explore the centrality of property in the creation of a viable identity – one that lends authority to history and the law as culturally and individually determining narratives. Continue reading →.
“’A Strange Sympathy’: The Rhetoric of Emotion in The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker” by Elizabeth J. Mathews
Aphra Behn’s 1689 novella, The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker, presents an opportunity to explore the portrayal of suffering and victimhood in an unlikely place: the figure of a double murderer. The titular nun, Isabella de Vallery, succumbs to earthly love and elopes, a decision that propels her to hardship, unintentional bigamy, and spousal homicide. Continue reading →.
PEDAGOGY:
“‘The Only Beguiled Person’: Accessing Fantomina in the Feminist Classroom” by Kate Levin
A few years ago, I wrote an article comparing the experience of teaching Paradise Lost and Fantomina in a required first-year English class at Barnard College. In that article, I celebrated the feminist pleasures of teaching Haywood’s work for its relative accessibility, which I claimed empowered my classes of all-female students to find their own voices. Continue reading →.
“A Reflection on Teaching, Multiculturalism, and Access” by Srividhya Swaminathan
The newest trend to besiege higher education puts increased emphasis on “proving” the efficacy of the liberal arts curriculum with some quantifiable measures. This imperative introduces a new concern in pedagogy as educators seek new ways to gauge the degree of knowledge acquisition in rapidly changing classroom environments. Continue reading →.
“Teaching Eighteenth-Century Literature as a Feminist Scholar in the New Millennium” by Alison Conway, Sharon Harrow, Nora Nachumi, and Laura Runge
These essays address the central question of how to be feminist in the 21st Century classroom…All raise concerns about the following broad topics: how to respond to the critical distancing from feminism; the need to engage students and ideas and how to do so; and the potential to use feminist eighteenth-century studies as a way of illustrating important concerns for today’s students. The essays are also practical in that they offer specific strategies to use in the classroom. Continue reading →.
NEW MEDIA:
“Digitally Reconstructing the Reynolds Retrospective Attended by Jane Austen in 1813: A Report on E-Work-in-Progress” by Janine Barchas
Our website encourages visitors to wander through the 1813 art exhibition Jane Austen visited and to guide their way through the paintings on display—starting with the whole length portrait of George III, which in the Reynolds show was “No. 1” at the top of the North Room. Continue reading →.
“In Search of Lady Isabella’s Library; or, A Question of Access” by Patricia L. Hamilton
Over the past thirty years, scholars have suggested that Charlotte Lennox drew on a variety of sources to shape The Female Quixote. Some of these, such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the romances of Scudéry and La Calprenède, and Boyle’s Parthenissa, are self-evident within the novel. Continue reading →.
“Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access” by Sheila Cavanagh
In the realm of the digital…entrenched traditional standards of assessment, support, and recognition still fail to encourage the kind of exciting new research that keeps our disciplines vibrant. While some organizations, such as the Modern Language Association (MLA), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) have made significant efforts to address the need for national dialogues about germane topics, numerous faculty members, department chairs, deans, and others involved in the faculty reward system continue not to understand the shifting parameters of research, teaching, and service that have been instigated by the digital revolution. Continue reading →.
REVIEWS:
Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World, by Mary Beth Norton, reviewed by Leigh Johnson
In Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World, Mary Beth Norton traces the countercurrents that led to women’s relegation to the private sphere of the family and exclusion from public commentary on political events. Continue reading →.
Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality, by Peter Otto, reviewed by Stacey Kikendall
In his book, Multiplying Worlds, Peter Otto attempts to bring together traditional ideologies of Romanticism with the modern concept of virtuality. Continue reading →.
The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London, ed. by Paula Humfrey, reviewed by Marisa Iglesias
Through the legal documents presented in this volume, Humfrey aims to change the accepted narrative that suggests female domestic servants did little to build London’s economic infrastructure and instead argues that London’s early modern female servants contributed markedly to the urban economy. Continue reading →.
Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World, ed. by Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernández, reviewed by Kirsten Schultz
Building on earlier research, including that of several of the pioneering scholars included here, and offering new evidence and analyses, Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World illuminates both the ideas and practices that gendered knowledge and education and the ways in which women contended with the limits on, and opportunities for, reading and writing. Continue reading →.
Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection MFA-Houston, reviewed by David Mazella
The sixty or so paintings on view provide an excellent opportunity to think about the term “realism” in a comparative way, placing realism between the verbal and visual arts, and allowing us to consider how genre, style, and subject matter can inflect our notions of realism. Continue reading →.
The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein, ed. by Judy A. Hayden, reviewed by Laura Miller
The common narrative of Restoration and eighteenth-century science describes men’s scientific contributions and influence, beginning with the foundation of the Royal Society during the Restoration and transforming into a source of British pride as well as the partial architect of its industrial and colonial strength. This collection creates an effective parallel narrative of women’s contributions to science, with thirteen essays arranged in ascending chronological order. Continue reading →.
NOTES AND DISCOVERIES:
Welcome to “Notes and Discoveries”
“Notes and Discoveries” is a new section of ABO The purpose of the section is to share those snippets of research that add to our store of knowledge of eighteenth-century women in the arts. Continue Reading →.
ASK APHRA:
Timely Correspondence
Dear Aphra, I appreciate your guidance! I particularly appreciate your sharing of K.T.S.’s letter, and my question follows from one of her suggestions to session chairs regarding acknowledgment of receipt. Continue Reading →.
Fashion and MLA
Dear Aphra, I have an MLA job interview coming up and I’m not sure what to wear. Continue Reading →.
Conference Etiquette
Aphra shall here communicate to the World a Letter of Interest, which she believes will give the Reader as good Advice as any that she is able to furnish her with, and therefore shall make no Apology for it… Continue Reading →.
,2: September 2012