Associate Professor and Director, Honors English
English
I work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, with a particular focus on the relationship between literature, law, and ethics. I also have broad interests in gender studies, transatlantic studies, and the history of the novel. My research is driven by the desire to understand how debates about law and justice have shaped literary texts in the past and how literature can help us think through questions of law and justice that remain of concern to this day. I hold a Ph.D. in English Literature and an M.A. in American Studies from Yale University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. My work has been generously supported by a number of fellowships, including a 2021鈥�22 Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a 2024鈥�26 Way Klingler Faculty Fellowship from 探花视频.
My first book, (University of Virginia Press, 2019), reveals the centrality of nuptial law to early novels, showing how writers from Daniel Defoe to Mary Wollstonecraft responded and contributed to debates about the legal regulation of marriage. My edited volume, (Cambridge UP, 2025), highlights the contributions of eighteenth-century studies to the law-and-literature enterprise while showing how imaginative writers participated in a range of legal developments during a period known for both legal and literary innovation.
I have published essays on legal and ethical dimensions of texts by authors including Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Margaret Atwood. I have also written on the evolution of law and literature as an interdisciplinary field and on courtroom storytelling in nineteenth-century America. My current projects include a study of eighteenth-century literature and penal reform, a study of nineteenth-century fiction and criminal responsibility, and a series of essays on Romantic women writers' engagements with moral philosophy. In addition, I am co-editing a multi-volume collection of primary-source materials (under contract with Routledge) related to British law and literature in the long nineteenth century.
In my teaching, as in my research, I emphasize the interplay between literary form and historical change. I teach a range of classes, from introductory surveys to special topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, law and literature, and the history of the novel. Recent undergraduate offerings include two legal-themed classes, 鈥淟egal Fictions of the Enlightenment鈥� and 鈥淐rime and Punishment in English Fiction,鈥� which count toward the interdisciplinary minor in Law and Society; a section of English 3000 (the gateway class for English majors) entitled 鈥淧rotest and Rebellion in the British Tradition,鈥� which surveys literature from the late eighteenth century to the present day; and a first-year Honors seminar that examines representations of justice and judgment from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Melville and Douglass to Ida Fink and Ferdinand von Schirach. At the graduate level, my courses include 鈥淟iterature and the Passions in the Age of Reason,鈥� 鈥淟iterature and Politics in the Age of Revolution,鈥� and 鈥淭he Eighteenth-Century Novel.鈥� I also maintain an active interest in pedagogy and have led workshops on teaching strategies for beginning and advanced instructors in the humanities and social sciences.
From 2019 to 2021, I served as Director of Strategy in the English Department, where I oversaw outreach and marketing efforts and organized career-oriented and community-building events. I remain committed to fostering a broad understanding of the value of English and the humanities and their centrality to public life. I also enjoy fostering and participating in interdisciplinary exchanges and recently completed a term on the Executive Committee of the MLA Forum on Law and the Humanities. Here at 探花视频, I convene the Humanities Research Colloquium and serve as Director of the Honors English Program. I look forward to connecting with students and colleagues who share my research and teaching interests.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate:
- Foundations in Rhetoric: The Rhetoric of Criminal Justice
- Core Honors First-Year Seminar: Imagining Evil
- Core Honors First-Year Seminar: Justice and Judgment in the Western Imagination
- Introduction to Literary Studies: Protest and Rebellion in the British Tradition
- The Rise of the Novel
- Legal Fictions of the Enlightenment
- Crime and Punishment in English Fiction
- Victorian Literature and Social Reform
- Humanities Honors Project Seminar
Graduate:
- The Eighteenth-Century Novel
- Literature and the Passions in the Age of Reason
- Literature and Politics in the Age of Revolution
Research Interests
- British Literature and Culture, 1700鈥�1900
- History of the Novel
- Law and Literature
- Literature and Ethics
- Moral, Social, and Political Thought
- Women鈥檚 and Gender Studies
- Transatlantic Studies
Publications
Book:
- (University of Virginia Press, 2019). Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Edited Volume:
- (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Articles and Book Chapters:
- "Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and the Legal Fiction of Marital Unity," forthcoming in The Elgar Handbook on Legal Fictions, ed. Kristin Albrecht, Lisa Siraganian, and Simon Stern (Edward Elgar Publishing).
- 鈥淭estimony, Truth, and Judgment in Alias Grace,鈥� in , ed. Lauren Rule Maxwell (MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series, 2025), 84鈥�93.
- "Introduction," in , ed. Melissa J. Ganz (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 1鈥�24.
- "A Higher Tribunal": Equity, Law, and the Family in Sir Charles Grandison," in , ed. Melissa J. Ganz (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 103鈥�24.
- "," Literature Compass, 22, no. 2 (June 2025).
- 鈥�,鈥� in Law, Equity, and Romantic Writing: Seeking Justice in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 86鈥�104.
- "," in The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English, ed. Sarah Eron, Nicole N. Aljoe, and Suvir Kaul (Routledge, 2024), 203鈥�15.
- "," in Daniel Defoe in Context, ed. Albert J. Rivero and George Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 257鈥�64.
- "," Critical Analysis of Law: An International and Interdisciplinary Law Review 9, no. 2 (Fall 2022): 46鈥�57. Book Forum on Lisa Siraganian's Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (Oxford UP, 2021).
- "'," Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, no. 1 (Fall 2022): 53鈥�74.
- "'," Review of English Studies 73, no. 309 (April 2022): 344鈥�60. (February 2, 2022).
- "," in Approaches to Teaching Austen's "Persuasion," ed. Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire (MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series, 2021), 175鈥�82.
- ",鈥� Nineteenth-Century Literature 70, no. 3 (December 2015): 363鈥�97.
- "Freedom and Fetters: Nuptial Law in Burney鈥檚 The Wanderer,鈥� in Impassioned Jurisprudence: Law, Literature, and Emotion, 1760-1848, ed. Nancy E. Johnson (Bucknell University Press, 2015), 66鈥�88.
- ,鈥� Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 25鈥�51.
- 鈥�,鈥� ELH 75, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 565鈥�602.
- 鈥�,鈥� Henry James Review 27, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 156鈥�74.
- 鈥�,鈥� Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17, no. 2 (January 2005): 157鈥�82.
- 鈥�,鈥� Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 9, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 255鈥�303.
Shorter Essays and Other Contributions:
- "," Fifteen Eighty Four, November 2025.
- "Marriage," in , ed. Robert Spoo and Simon Stern (Edward Elgar, January 2025), 302鈥�06.
- "," in on Commonplacing and Commonplace Books, ed. Kacie L. Wills and Olivia Loksing Moy, vol. 3 (October 2024).
- Exhibition Labels for Cruelty in Perfection (Plate III of The Four Stages of Cruelty) by William Hogarth and Court of Chancery, Lincoln Inn's Hall by Augustus C. Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, "Exploring the 探花视频 Core Curriculum--Basic Needs and Justice: The Pursuit of Human Flourishing," Haggerty Museum of Art, Spring 2023.
- 鈥�,鈥� in The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom, ed. Diana Fuss and William A. Gleason (Princeton University Press, 2015), 21鈥�23.
- Reviews in American Journal of Legal History; Journal of British Studies; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Law and Literature; Modern Philology; Victorian Studies; and Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities.
Honors and Awards
- Way Klingler Fellowship, 探花视频, 2024鈥�26.
- Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, 2021鈥�22.
- Walker Cowen Memorial Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Virginia Press, 2018.
- Way Klingler Young Scholar Award, 探花视频, 2015.
- Principal Investigator, Strategic Innovation Fund Grant, 探花视频, 2015鈥�17.
- Interdisciplinary Summer Grant, Institute for Women's Leadership, 2023.
- Summer Faculty Fellowship, 探花视频, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2021.
- Faculty Research Mini-Grant, Center for Peacemaking, 探花视频, 2021.
- Newberry Renaissance Consortium Grant, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2019, 2023.
- Harvard College Fellowship, Department of English, Harvard University, 2010鈥�12.
- Certificate of Teaching Excellence, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and Office of the Dean for Undergraduate Education, Harvard University, 2010, 2011, 2012.
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Introduction to the Humanities Program, Stanford University, 2007鈥�10.
- Honorable Mention, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Essay Prize, 2008.
- Junior Scholar, Fifth Annual Law and Humanities Workshop, 2006 (sponsored by Columbia Law School, Georgetown Law School, UCLA School of Law, and the University of Southern California Center for Law, History, and Culture).
- Dissertation Fellowship, Yale University, 2005.
- John F. Enders Fellowship, Yale University, 2005.
- Catharine Macaulay Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2004.
Additional Information
Office Hours
Fall 2025
- TuTh 2:00-3:30
- By appointment
Teaching Schedule
Fall 2025
- ENGL 4423/101 TuTh 12:30鈥�1:45 Cudahy Hall 114
- Legal Fictions of the Enlightenment
- ENGL 4999H/901 TBA
Dr. Melissa J. Ganz探花视频
