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 (Dent: 1996); The Damnation of Harold Frederic (Syracuse
University Press: 1997); Grub Street to the Ivory Tower (Clarendon
Press: 1998); Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms,
1854-1936, (Manchester University Press: 2002) and Twelve
Months in an English Prison (Routledge: 2003, two volumes).
My most recent work is a monograph titled Transatlantic
Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. A one year
Leverhulme Trust Fellowship supported the early research. 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. Longer term projects include work on representations
of Ancient Egypt; ideas of danger within United States culture Dangerous
Domesticities: Narratives of Anxiety in the United States; representations
of twins.
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.
Recent/Forthcoming activity
"Home and Homelands: Dangerous Domesticities and the United States",
Department of American Studies, King's College London, 5 December 2007.
"Double Acts: Mary Ellen Marks' Twins and Uncanny Performances",
Literature and Photography Symposium, University of Leeds, 10 November 2007.
"Ketaki Sheth's Twinspotting and Mary Ellen Mark's Twins",
University of Vercelli, 13 October 2007.
"'It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the
market place': Punishment and Public Performance", Performing Literatures
conference, University of Leeds, 30 June 2007.
"Mummies and Dandies", Victorians and the Arab World: Creative Connections
conference, University of Leeds, 14 April 2007.
"'There's no place like home': The Wizard of Oz and Reconfigurations
of Home", Baltimore, North East Modern Languages Association conference,
March 2007.
For details of my upcoming series of workshops on Reconfigurations of home: movement, places and people, please click on the link
Teaching
Undergraduate
Danger
and Domesticity in American Literature
American
Words, American Worlds 1900-Present
Writing
America
Postgraduate
Writing
about death in C19th America
If you have entered our site at this page, please click here to go to our main pages.