Previous Semesters in my Career

Fall 2005

Coursework:
Nineteenth Century American Novel (Evelev)
Renaissance Literature (Read)

Teaching: ENG1000: Exposition and Argumentation

Presentation:
"Beyond Sentimental: Conflicted Sympathies In Late Georgian Comic Opera"
Aphra Behn Society, October 29, 2005.

Winter 2006

Coursework:
Textual Criticism (Quirk)
18th Century Literature: Richardson, Burney, Austen (Justice)
Unions and their Discontents: Britain 1707-1914 (Koditschek - History)

Teaching: ENG2100: Writing About Literature

Presentations:
"Introducing Portrait: How Current Editions Construct James and his Heroine"
MU EGSA Conference, February 17, 2006.

Panel Chair (with Dr. Pam Benoit). "Graduate School: Considerations & Possibilities." Griffiths Leadership Society for Women Conference, Columbia, MO, 23 April 2006.

Summer 2006

Coursework:
History of the English Language (Gordon)

Fall 2006

Coursework:
19th-Century British Literature: Romanticism and History (Heringman)
Contemporary Critical Approaches (Cohen - syllabus)

Teaching:
ENG1210: Readings in British Literature
ENG1000: Exposition and Argumentation

Presentation:
"Wanderer’s End: Understanding Burney’s Approach to Endings"
Frances Burney Society, October 26-8, 2006.

Winter 2007

Coursework:
Intensive Beginning French (Molavi)
18th-Century British Literature: Jane Austen Among Women (Looser)

Teaching:
ENG2100: Writing About Literature

Summer 2007

Reading for Comprehensive Exams

Presentation:
"Life's Endings: Seeking Closure in Burney's Court Diaries"
Young Researchers Panel, UK Burney Society, Windsor, UK, July 6-7, 2007.

Soliciting (for Samuel Richardson Society):
For American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Portland, OR, 27-9 March 2008:
Call for Panelists: "Richardson in the Twenty-first Century: A Roundtable"
Call for Papers: "Beyond Clarissa: Sir Charles Grandison in Conversation"

Fall 2007

Soliciting (for Samuel Richardson Society at ASECS 2008):
Call for Papers: "Beyond Clarissa: Sir Charles Grandison in Conversation" (now closed)

Comprehensive Exams - October (now ABD)

Teaching:

"Lies! False Documents, Fictional Frauds, and Literary Hoaxes” This course will examine several kinds of literary "lies" -- the fictional "true story" (like Defoe's Moll Flanders or The Blair Witch Project), forgeries (like the Ossian poems or false Shakespeare plays of William Henry Ireland), frauds (like Laura Albert, AKA "JT LeRoy" or Carter's The Education of Little Tree), and false documents (such as in the work of Borges, Nabokov, or Bram Stoker's Dracula). We'll be investigating what makes a text "authentic" or "inauthentic" by examining works (novels, films, and everything in between) which play with our ideas of what makes for a "true story".

In two variations:

Presentation:
Napoleon on the Margins: Creating an End To the Revolution”
MidWestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (MW-ASECS), Kansas City, MO, October 11-13, 2007.

Spring 2008

Awards, etc.

  • Harry J. and Richard A. Hocks Dissertation Fellowship
  • First Prize, Creative Arts/Humanities Division MU 2008 Research and Creative Activities Forum
  • Elected Vice-Chair/Chair, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Graduate Caucus (Vice-Chair 2008-09, Chair 2009-2010)

Presentation and Other Activities:
“Identification Reconsidered: Beyond Sympathy in Eighteenth-Century Novels”

Chair/Organizer, "Beyond Clarissa: Sir Charles Grandison in Conversation" (Session V/68, Thursday)
Chair/Organizer, "Richardson in the Twenty-first Century: A Roundtable" (Session XIV/199, Saturday)
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Portland, OR March 27-9, 2008

Participant in the ASECS Graduate Caucus Reading Group, as essayist ("These Aids from Nature, join'd to the Wiles of Art": Some Thoughts (and more questions) on Fantomina's Roles) and as editor/contributor of a collection of essays on Sir Charles Grandison ("Introduction" and "Where Does Grandison End?")

Teaching:
ENG1210: Readings in British Literature: "Cultures of the Book"

Summer 2008

Service and Activities

  • Writing Writing Writing
  • Co-Chair, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Graduate Caucus
    • Soliciting for Richmond ASECS 2009 Panel:
      Beginnings and Endings: Locating Boundaries, Crises, and Turning Points in the (Very Long) Eighteenth-Century
      In the field of “long” eighteenth-century studies, the limits of our century are strikingly fluid. But the temporal borders are not the only boundaries that fall under debate. How we order our sense of turning points, movements, and crisis-points often varies greatly depending on our vantage point. Dividing up the period, thus, has always been a little messy. Many of us are aware of the border skirmishes that come up between labels such as “Regency” and “Romantic,” but there are other discrepancies. Some of these differences are geographical, as scholars of various national traditions mark different moments of crisis throughout the century. Other differences may be generic, as specialists in poetry, art history, or political science place very different turning points than scholars invested in a sense of the “rise” of the novel or the study of religious practice or technological advances. This panel asks how and why current scholars imagine (and reimagine) beginnings and ends. We seek papers that interrogate, challenge, and reaffirm the internal and external boundaries of the “long” eighteenth century. We also seek papers that explore the institutional, political, and academic stakes of doing so. Ideally, panelists would represent a wide variety of specialties and disciplinary leanings. We encourage proposals from graduate students and junior scholars. Please send abstracts to Emily C. Friedman by September 15.

Fall 2008

Presentation:
"Jane Austen: End or Beginning?"
Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) Chicago, IL, October 2-5, 2008.

Austen holds a curious space in literary history; three literary specialties (18th century novel, Romantics, Victorians) claim her. Friedman answers the question whether Austen is a new sort of Romantic writer, the literary heiress to novelists Richardson and Fielding, or even the mother of a new kind of novel.

Teaching:
ENG4996: Honors Seminar in English (Fall 2008, assistant to Professor Alexandra Socarides)

Activities:
Co-Chair, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Graduate Caucus

Spring 2009

Presentations

 

Fall 2009

Teaching

Presentations

  • "Sacred Taboos: Mary Brunton's Posthumous Packaging"
    East-Central ASECS, Lehigh University, October 8-11, 2009.

Spring 2010

Teaching

  • English 2217: Honors World Literature II
  • English 3540: Survey of British Literature II
    Cultures of the Book: from the Triple-Deckers to Kindles     (department description)

    This class will examine the period from the late eighteenth-century to present, with particular focus on the cultures in which literary texts were written and the changing technologies we use to read. How has reading changed in the last 200 years? How will it continue to change? Our readings will be supplemented by visits to Special Collections in RBD Library to learn more about the physical properties of the texts we read. Readings are very likely to include Austen's Mansfield Park, selections from Blake, Gissing's New Grub Street, texts from the Stanford Strand Project, and Stoppard's Arcadia. T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, and other Anglophone writers may also appear (as complicated as their connection to "Britishness" is!). Students will also reading John Feather's A History of British Publishing for context into "print culture"

    Requirements: Weekly short writing responses, in-class presentation, midterm and final exams.

Presentations

"Sanditon's Journey: The Fate of Austen's Final Fragment in Context" British Women Writers Conference. College Station, TX April 8-11, 2010.

"When a good end is hard to find: backmatter, indices, and novel endings"
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Albuquerque, NM. March 18-21, 2010.

Summer 2010

Seminar Participant, Project Narrative Summer Institute. The Ohio State University. June 28-July 9, 2010.

Fall 2010

Teaching

  • English 2230: British Literature I (two sections)
  • English 7170: Graduate Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies
    "A Laughing Matter: 1773 in Snapshot" (department course description)
    April De Angelis’s 2002 play A Laughing Matter draws from a wide swath of eighteenth-century culture to paint a comedic picture of the backstage antics leading up to the production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer. Using the playtext as a starting (and ending) point, this course will look at the work of “characters” such as Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Burke, Woffington, Hannah More, Cumberland, and Boswell, as well as those whom De Angelis left out, including Hester Thrale and the looming Richard Brinsley Sheridan, as well as writers publishing in that year (Wheatley, Barbauld, etc.)

Attending/Presenting

  • East-Central ASECS (Pittsburgh, PA)
    • Presenting: "Text, Playtext, Promptbook: The Intersecting Lives of Scott's Guy Mannering"
    • Organizer, "Recovering the “Performed” Eighteenth Century" (Roundtable)

Spring 2011

Teaching

Attending/Presenting

  • SE-ASECS (Wake Forest, NC)
    • Shepherding graduate students (7) to the conference
  • ASECS (Vancouver, BC)
    • Panelist, “Across Media, Across Genres: Methodologies for Comparing the Novel and the Theater” (Roundtable)- Organized Marcie Frank
    • Panelist, “From Dissertation to Publication” (Women’s Caucus Roundtable) - Organized by Misty G. Anderson
    • Organizer, “Richardson's Corpus: New Research"
    • Organizer, “Richardson's Corpus: A Working Group"
  • British Women Writers Conference (Columbus, OH)

Fall 2011

Teaching

  • English 4520: The Nineteenth-Century British Novel
    Two Hundred Years Since: Austen's Sister-Novelists in the Literary Marketplace"
    Today Jane Austen is the most famous woman writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but during her lifetimes she was neither the best-selling or even most-celebrated author among women. In this course we will look at the diversity of women's voices in the early days of the nineteenth century, examining the wide variety of subjects they tackled, and where the novel is headed, anticipating the work of writers of the imminent Victorian Period.     We will study the textual realities of novel-production, culminating in a student-curated exhibition of the treasurers of RBD Library's Special Collection.
  • English 4630: Major British Author: Frances Burney
    In her 1918 "Room of One's Own," Virigina Woolf famously dubbed Frances Burney D'Arblay "Mother of the Novel" and argued that "Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney" -- forgetting that Burney outlived Austen by decades. In fact, her writing life takes us from the late eighteenth-century, through the Romantic period, all the way to the dawning of the Victorian age. A successful novelist, devoted daughter, thwarted playwright, Court attendant, prolific keeper of diaries, happy wife and mother, writer of letters, mastectomy survivor, and finally a strange sort of biographer, Burney's life and work helps us better understand the world in which she lived -- a world, for better and worse, not unlike our own. This course will use the work of Frances Burney as a lens into the period during which she lived: a time of great artistic and social change: revolutions, "mad kings" and upstart tyrants, an expanding British Empire, and great debate at home and abroad.