Peer-reviewed articles (click bolded titles to read at Project Muse)
This article argues that the afterlife was a central component of antislavery literature throughout the long eighteenth century. Surveying antislavery writings by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Hannah More, William Cowper, Ignatius Sancho, and others, the essay contends that slavery led many abolitionists to reconsider the requirements for salvation and to afford heaven to non-Christian Africans enslaved across the globe. The essay therefore revises scholarly narratives of hell’s decline, insisting that it is best understood not simply as an idea in European intellectual history but as a complex set of responses to global oppression and political injustice.
This essay examines Percy Shelley and Thomas Hogg's 1810–1811 correspondence with the inventor Ralph Wedgwood. This largely ignored exchange has several implications for Shelley scholars and for students of unbelief more generally. Most prominently, the Wedgwood letters evince Shelley's abiding interest in combating the persistent association of theism with sympathy and sociability. The letters also challenge the standard scholarly account of Shelley's unbelief, which sees the early Shelley as a skeptical materialist and post-1816 Shelley as some sort of immaterialist or idealist. As these letters show, Shelley was critical of materialism long before 1816. Thus, in addition to bringing to light a previously disregarded epistolary exchange, this paper explores the multi-faceted, often surprising contours of Shelley's Romantic atheism.
“Untimely Old Age and Deformity in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.2 (Winter 2014–2015): 229–56.
While previous studies have debated the extent to which Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall values the disabled, this article argues that the novel’s treatment of disability cannot be separated from its treatment of gender and old age. Operating at the nexus of disability studies and aging studies, this article situates Scott’s novel as a key text in the history of disability. Writing in a century that was fascinated by the vagaries of human aging, Scott radically revises her culture’s principal assumptions about female old age. Whereas other eighteenth-century authors cast female aging as a process of undesirable deformation, Scott suggests that old age and disability benefit her heroines by bringing them into contact with the timeless realm of the divine. The novel therefore enriches our understanding of disability in the eighteenth century and beyond, demonstrating the powerful ways in which disability, gender, and temporality intersect.
“Posthumous Presence in Richardson's Clarissa.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 53.3 (Summer 2013): 601–21.
In Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, the eponymous heroine speaks from the dead. Her posthumous texts transcend the strictures of linear time and signal her commitment to a traditional Christian conception of temporality. By delineating that commitment, and by analyzing her posthumous texts in light of anthropological studies of material culture, this essay demonstrates that Clarissa remains dedicated to reforming the present world even after she enters divine eternity. The essay revises previous evaluations of Clarissa’s death that claim she is silenced in the grave. Ultimately, Clarissa reveals itself to be less hostile to the material world than is commonly assumed.