Seminars

In this talk I will present a critique of what I call “biocultural myths” about poverty—frameworks that fuse biological explanation with cultural storytelling to make inequality seem both natural and deserved. I argue that these myths operate by shifting attention away from structural and historical forces (such as labor exploitation, colonial legacies, uneven access to education, and policy design) and instead locating the “problem” of poverty inside the bodies and behaviors of poor people themselves. I trace the roots of biocultural myths about poverty to the 18th and early 19th centuries, showing how Enlightenment-era classification systems and early industrial capitalism converged to redefine the poor as a distinct and problematic “type” of human. During this period, poverty began to be interpreted less as a temporary economic condition and more as a quasi-natural state linked to character, biology, and moral worth. Emerging institutions such as workhouses in Britain embodied this shift: they were designed not just to relieve poverty but to discipline it, based on the assumption that idleness and dependency were ingrained traits among the poor. At the same time, early forms of statistical analysis and classification helped solidify these ideas. Governments and reformers began collecting data on crime, disease, and poverty, which created the impression that these phenomena were stable, measurable attributes of specific populations. but this was not neutral knowledge production: it contributed to constructing the poor as a deviant class, prone to vice, illness, and degeneracy. Cultural narratives reinforced this image, depicting the poor as morally suspect, lacking self-control, and resistant to improvement. These representations justified increasingly coercive policies, including the harsh conditions of workhouses and the distinction between the “deserving” poor (such as the elderly or disabled) and the “undeserving” able-bodied poor, who were seen as willfully idle. I also connect this period to the early development of ideas that would later crystallize into scientific racism and eugenics. Although not yet fully articulated in biological terms, there was already a tendency to associate poverty with hereditary weakness or degeneration, laying the groundwork for later claims that social hierarchies reflected natural differences between groups. I argue that the 18th- and early 19th-century discourse effectively fused moral judgment, economic theory, and proto-scientific reasoning into a powerful explanatory system. This system made inequality appear both rational and inevitable, while legitimizing forms of governance that sought to manage, contain, and correct the poor rather than address the structural causes of their condition.

n recent decades, scholars across disciplines have described a capacious category of work they call "care labor": the paid and unpaid attentions to human bodies that raise them and sustain them through infancy, illness, disability, and old age. Beginning in roughly 1660, the line item in ledgers -- “nurse” -- accounted not just for services rendered in childcare but in medical care, and this talk begins by finding in the expansion of the noun and verb “nurse” an eighteenth-century conception of care work, in which the period recognized shared practices, conditions, and problematics in looking after another as a form of labor. By the end of the century, “nurse” loses this ambiguity as new notions of motherhood delineated which of nursing’s labors were “natural” and which were “menial.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s body of writing exemplifies this transition, and her political writing depicts the mother’s natural care as distinct from the menial work of the servant that supports it. However, ending care work proves difficult for Wollstonecraft, especially as she turns her pen to writing the lives of a mother and a nurse in her posthumous, incomplete novel The Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798). The novel is caught between its two characters, unable to disentangle them, and – as this talk will argue – unable to disentangle its narrative voice from the poetry the characters read and share. This interrupting poetic voice extends the voice of the nurse, and this talk will gesture at poetry’s part in interrupting imagined ends to care work.

Charlotte Smith and Phillis Wheatley Peters' poems juxtapose both human and non-human species on and within oceans. In "Beachy Head," Smith delineates the Atlantic's surface spotted by an eighteenth-century ship of commerce travelling the globe, filled with spices from Asia and round pearls, recovered by the slave diving in and plucking them from the "rough sea rock, deep beneath the waves." Wheatley Peters in “Ocean” and other poems excavates and creates subjectivity through the power of water, a process denied on land. My talk will discuss how both Smith and Wheatley Peters' poetry records the construction of varied subjectivities produced through marine materiality and in transit. At a time when in-transit and marginalized identities are actively being erased by hegemonic forces, revisiting these poets allows us to see how such forces can be resisted and turned. I will conclude with examples of public humanities and pedagogy projects that show the way to educate a wider public about productive resistance to erasure and lean towards cultural memory and education.

Scholars agree that the concept of fetal personhood did not exist in eighteenth-century Britain. Despite recent arguments to the contrary, including those advanced by the U.S. Supreme Court, Enlightenment intellectuals did not tend to accord the rights and perquisites of personhood (juridical or moral) to the so-called unborn child (nor the child, nor the adolescent for that matter). Personhood was (and arguably is) a rare status even when we consider adults: as the philosopher Charles Mills put it, “most humans were not and are not socially recognized persons, or, more neatly and epigrammatically put: most persons are non-persons.” However, eighteenth-century artists and writers did at times imagine something like the fetus’s autonomy or separability—and jurists did identify exceptional cases wherein a fetus might approach something like the status of person. How might we understand this tension between personhood's parsimony and elasticity? This paper is part of a larger project wherein I explore the implications of Mills’s observation to our study of eighteenth-century fiction. Personhood is a rare status, and yet the early novel displays kaleidoscopic varieties of non-personhood (women, adolescents, the enslaved, criminals, animals, and so on). I turn to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to think about the homunculus’s claims to personhood and the consequences of those claims. How are we to understand that “little gentleman,” the homunculus? Does the homunculus extend or duplicate the personhood of the father? Is the gestating woman a corporate person? How might personhood be exercised from within the womb? Finally, I use the test case of homuncular personhood to show where legal and literary personhood converge, and where they remain incommensurable.

A century or two before New York’s wealthiest families sent their daughters to marry into the British aristocracy, heiresses to equally irresistible fortunes founded on Caribbean slavery bought their way into British society. But their global stories touch unexpected people, places and objects, from Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and America's Founding Fathers, to India and Australia; Charleston, East Florida and New York’s Chelsea, besides artworks in the Met, the Frick, and the Getty. Miranda will share details of the heiresses' dramatic lives, how she traced them in the archives, and also how she pieced together biographical details of some of the people they enslaved.

While there are excellent ongoing efforts to expand, interrogate, and diversify the canon in the history of philosophy, philosophers have been slow to move away from traditional genres of philosophical writing. Essays and dialogues are routinely studied (although their literary elements are often passed over), but works like poetry, plays, novels, conduct books, and children’s literature are rarely considered. This paper takes up the challenge to incorporate non-canonical genres into the history of philosophy, hoping to show that the methodological decision to read widely and across genres is fruitful. Specifically, a central philosophical topic, the government of the passions, is regularly treated in the educational and fictional literature of the Early Modern period, and it is often treated in the context of discussions of domestic life, marriage, and child-rearing. Relying on works by Lord Halifax, Rousseau, Hannah More, Samuel Richardson, and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (and Fanny Burney if there's time!) I argue that the prevailing view of the government of the passions as self-government is challenged and complicated by this literature. Unlike the standard view, which holds that the government of the passions is intra-personal work, the work of the individual on her own self, this countering view holds that it was the special duty of virtuous women to regulate the emotions of the people around them. Inter-personal emotion regulation appears as a central duty of a woman, primarily in her role as mistress of a household. While the educational literature presses this gendered and inter-personal model as a central part of the duties of the good woman, the fictional literature tests it, examining whether we could or should try to achieve it.