Kathleen Lubey

I specialize in the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain, sexuality and gender studies, feminist theory, history of pornography, literature of the British slave trade, and literary criticism and theory. My new book What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford 2022) works with little-known archival texts to trace currents of feminism and social justice in British pornography from the 1740s to the present. My first book, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 (Bucknell 2012), examined the relationship between sexual representation and discourses on morality, aesthetics, and reading in a broad range of eighteenth-century texts. I am beginning a new book project that asks skeptically if marriage was revered by eighteenth-century writers, as is often alleged, and pieces of that project--on Hester Piozzi's marginalia and on the novel The Woman of Colour--are recently out in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature and Studies in Romanticism, respectively. My publications also include a co-edited special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation on the “The Novel as Theory" and articles in ELH, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, differences, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Recently appointed Book Review Editor for the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies, I am also a member of Eighteenth-Century Fiction's Editorial Board and of the Executive Committee of the MLA Forum in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English. I have been awarded research fellowships by the University of Pennsylvania and by the Walpole, Beinecke, and Chawton House Libraries.