Overview
I’m a literary historian with expertise in the Romantic period in Britain, especially the 1790s. I hold an M.A. in English from Queen’s University at Kingston, Canada, and I expect to receive my Ph.D. in English from Duke University in May 2025.
My ongoing dissertation project, "Blush, Britannia: Collective Shame and the Moral Anguish of Empire, 1776-1806," considers the significance of collective shame in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain through the writings of Frances Burney, John Newton, William Cowper, Anna Laetita Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and others. This project attends to a paradox: in the second half of the eighteenth century, the British public, shaped by Enlightenment values, is thought to have wholly embraced individualism and self-interest; yet, with increasing conviction and insistence, literature and political discourse of this period made claims about the collective shame and collective moral failure of Britain and the British Empire.. The idea of collective shame, I argue, was central to how men and women ‘at home’ in Britain understood the often-remote violence of empire. Although collective shame is a negative emotion, it was nevertheless unifying, contributing to British national identity at a time when the moral aspirations of British imperialism (to spread civilization and Christian values) had come to look imperiled amid controversy over slavery and revolutionary violence.