Professor Bridget Bennett BA, DPhil, York
For a list of publications since 2001 click here
For a full list of publications click here
Research Interests
My research interests are reflected in my main publications: Ripples of Dissent (1996); The Damnation of Harold Frederic (1997); Grub Street to the Ivory Tower (1998); Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854-1936, (2002) and Twelve Months in an English Prison (2003, two volumes).
My most recent major work is a monograph titled Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2007). A one year Leverhulme Trust Fellowship supported the early research and it was completed with AHRC support. The book focuses on powerful kinds of haunting that often involve impersonations and acts of ventriloquism. Its argument is that United States culture is built upon a history that includes, alongside what conventionally exists within cultural memory, the relics of what refuses to be repudiated and forgotten. These often surface at moments of trauma or transformation, articulated through processes in which the spirits of the dead speak with and through the living. In this manner the past can be reconstituted and reclaimed according to the political, social and cultural needs of the moment. Transatlantic Spiritualism argues that an examination of the ways in which the spirits of the dead are performed within the nineteenth-century United States allows for re-readings of the country's troubling colonial past and its ongoing relationship with African, European and Indian religious and cultural beliefs and practices.
I am currently working on a monograph titled Danger at Home. This focuses on the relationship between home and danger within US culture from the colonial period onwards. I argue that the home, often valorised as a place of safety in cultural texts, is always a place of incipient danger, either from within its boundaries or from beyond them. Home is both a location (though not necessarily a single location) and an affective category. As an abstract concept home encompasses not only material ideas, represented by dwelling places and physical structures, but also ideas of belonging usually shaped by complex interactions between cultural, ethnic, religious or other factors. It describes places of origin as well as of current domicile, and can encompass the ways these are connected through memory, desire and longing.
I have supervised or am supervising theses on a wide range of topics including A.R.Ammons; C19th U.S. urban fiction; Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Gaskell; social realism and the daguerreotype; citizenship, transformation and U.S. fiction. I would be willing to supervise students working on any of the areas that I'm researching on, or any cognate area. Please feel free to contact me to discuss research plans. I am especially interested in United States literary culture and cultural history with a particular focus on the nineteenth century; spiritualism and spiritualist performances and their impact on literary and cultural formations and representation; transatlanticism and the circumatlantic; cultures of home.
Recent/Forthcoming activity
April 2010, "Early Modern Captivity and Places of Home", University of East Anglia, British Association for American Studies.
March 2010, "Imagining Home on the Frontier", European Association for America Studies Conference, Trinity and University Colleges, Dublin.
March 2010, "Early Modern Captivity and Places of Home", Department of English, Kent University.
January 2010, "Early Modern Captivity and Places of Home", Northumbria University, Early Modern Dis/Locations.
April 2009, "Performing Terror: Reading 'The Scarlet Letter' After Iraq", University of California San Diego.
October 2008 Roundtable discussant at University of Nottingham, "New Perspectives on the American Nineteenth Century."
September 2008 "Transatlantic Literary Relations", plenary at University of Leeds "Who are the Victorians?"
June 2008 "The affective Structures of Home in the United States", at National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan "Colonialism and Modernity in East Asia."
June 2008 "Literary Studies and the Global Cultural Economy", Department of English, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan.
December 2007 "'There's No Place Like Home': Home, Homesteads, Homelands and The Wizard of Oz", Department of American Studies, King's College London.
November 2007 "Double Acts: Mary Ellen Marks' Twins and Uncanny Performances", Literature and Photography symposium, University of Leeds.
July 2007 "'It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place.': Punishment and Public Performance", at University of Leeds, "Performing Literatures."
March 2007 "'There's no place like home': The Wizard of Oz and Reconfigurations of Home", Baltimore, North East Modern Languages Association.
October 2007 "Double Acts: Mary Ellen Marks' Twins and Uncanny Performances", colloquium in American Studies, University of Vercelli.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Danger
and Domesticity in American Literature
American
Words, American Worlds 1900-Present
Writing
America
Prose: Reading and Interpretation
Poetry: Reading and Interpretation
Postgraduate
Writing
about death in C19th America
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