RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP

In Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States (Oxford University Press, 2020), Travis M. Foster, PhD, associate professor of English and academic director of Villanova’s Gender and Women’s Studies Program, offers an important new study of popular literature’s role in refashioning and resisting white supremacy in an emergent post-emancipation climate. In his book, Dr. Foster discusses how popular literary and cultural genres influenced how Americans understood their social and political affiliations, their citizenship, and their race. In the wake of emancipation’s failed promise, two key developments unfolded: white supremacy amassed new mechanisms and procedures for reproducing racial hierarchy, and black freedom developed new practices for collective expression and experimentation. This new “racial ordinary” came into being, his book argues, through literary and cultural genres, including campus novels (novels whose main action is set in and around a university campus), the Ladies' Home Journal, Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons.

In Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth Century Realism (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Mary Mullen, PhD, claims that novels by Irish writers like Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, Charles Joseph Kickham, and George Moore help us reinterpret novels by English writers like George Eliot and Charles Dickens. In her book, Dr. Mullen examines anachronisms in realist writing to redefine British realism and demonstrate how institutions constrain social relationships in the present—and limit our sense of political possibilities in the future.

Brooke Hunter, PhD, published a new book Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies (Routledge, 2018). Dr. Hunter's book examines the influence of the thirteenth-century Pseudo-Boethian forgery De disciplina scolarium on medieval understandings of Boethius (died 524 CE). Tracing the popularity of De disciplina’s vision of Boethius in the middle ages in relation to its current scholarly neglect, Dr. Hunter shows how medieval schoolmen saw themselves and the past, and how modern scholars imagine the medieval past. In exploring this alternate Boethian persona through a variety of different works including texts of translatio studii et imperii, common school texts, the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and humanist writings, Dr. Hunter's book reveals a new vein of medieval Boethianism that is earthy, practical and even humorous.

Joseph Drury, PhD, is the author of the book, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. It argues that many of the most important formal innovations in eighteenth-century fiction were critical responses to the new prominence of machines in Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. His second project explores the representation of idolatry and iconoclasm in eighteenth-century culture. He is also currently working on an essay on "Science" for the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson.