Current Research
As of this writing (January 2012), I am wrapping up several small projects I initially took on as “palate cleansers” after completing my dissertation. My first year at Auburn I researched the work of the little-known Austen contemporary Mary Brunton, which became "Austen among the fragments: Understanding the Fate of Sanditon," which will appear as the final article in a special issue of Women's Writing on "Rethinking Influence, 1680-1830" edited by Jennie Batchelor (2012). In addition, I was able to transform my past work on adaptation and the work of Sir Walter Scott thanks to new material found at the British Library this past summer, and have sent out for review "Text, Playtext, Promptbook: The Covent Garden Edits of Guy Mannering, 1815-1834" (article, currently under review at Modern Philology). I am also revising other past work on the intersection of theatre and novel history into "Schools Before and Beyond Scandal: Contextualizing The School for Scandal, 1732-1800" for inclusion in Raising the Screen: New Perspectives on Richard Brinsley Sheridan, edited by Dan Ennis and Jack DeRochi (under contract with Bucknell University Press) (due February 15, 2012).
As I completed these smaller pieces during the last summer and fall, I began to pursue a tighter, more manageable, and more timely book project, which develops my interest in the lesser-noticed parts of the early novel alongside an emerging interest in the rhetoric of smell. I have completed secondary reading on the senses, specifically olfaction, and am in the middle of writing Reading Smell in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1720-1820. As of the present writing I have completed and consulted with colleagues on a proposed outline of chapters and book proposal, have made substantial headway on several chapters, and have applied for numerous fellowships based on the strength of this project. It is my hope to have the introduction and a chapter or two completed by the time of my subfield’s largest meeting (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in March 2012), and to spend my leave time (Summer and Fall 2012) in the process of completing and submitting the manuscript for review.
My longer-term plans include returning to the endings project, as well as continuing archival work for a project on never-published manuscript fiction between 1760 and 1860, inspired and begun by the 22+ examples I have already found and read or transcribed in libraries and public records offices in Britain. The Samuel Richardson Society is in preliminary talks with Bucknell University Press about inaugurating a book series with the Press, which I hope will begin in earnest in the next five years.