Profile for Kate Parker
Specialty area(s)
Restoration and Eighteenth-century European literature and culture; gender and sexuality studies
Brief biography
Director, UWL Institute for Social Justice (2018-2021)
IE Specialist, Center for Advancing Teaching & Learning (2020-2023)
Education
Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011
Research and publishing
My research centers on the literature of sensibility in the eighteenth century. I am particularly interested in how assumptions of (implicitly masculine) autonomy in the period become complicated by women writers and authors of erotic texts, who seek to understand autonomy as only possible through intimate relations with other beings and things.
Current book project: "Relational Selves: Gender, Translation, and the Question of Autonomy in the Eighteenth Century" (under contract with the Early Modern Feminisms series published by University of Delaware/University of Virginia Press)
I have published two co-edited volumes with the Bucknell University Press, "Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered" (with Courtney Weiss Smith, 2013) and "Sade's Sensibilities" (with Norbert Sclippa, 2014) and essays on Sade, the poet James Thomson, the novelist Eliza Haywood, and the intersections of feminist criticism and translation theory.