(Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 1990)
Associate Professor, English Department
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
tel: (805) 893-3349
fax: (805) 893-4622
email: ecook@english.ucsb.edu
Areas of Interest
Eighteenth-Century British and French literature and cultural studies.
| Books and Recent Articles |
- "Charlotte Smith and 'The Swallow': Migration and Authorship" (accepted for an essay collection under submission).
- "The Epistolary Novel": Encyclopedia of British Literature (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).
- "Enlightenment Landscapes": Encyclopedia of Enlightenment (Oxford Univ. Press, 2003).
- "'Perfect' Flowers, Monstrous Women: Eighteenth-Century Botany and the Modern Gendered Subject," in 'Defects': Engendering the Modern Body, eds. H. Deutsch and F. Nussbaum (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000).
- "Crown Forests and Female Georgic: Franes Burney and the Reconstruction of Britishness," in The Country and the City Revisited, eds. D. Landry, G. Maclean, and J. Ward (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
- Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford University Press, 1996).
- "The Limping Woman and the Public Sphere," in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, eds. D. v. Muecke and V. Kelley (Stanford University Press, 1994).
- "Going Public: The Letter and the Contract in Fanni Butlerd." Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1), 1990, pp. 21-45.
- "Selborne's Cultural Landscapes," in Cultural Landscapes: Gilbert White and "The Natural History of Selborne" (Stanford University Libraries, 1989), pp. 14-36.
Selected Conference and Colloquium Presentations:
- "Arboreal Values." Department of English, University of Oregon, February 2008.
- "Arboreal Values: Dead Trees in Seward, Smith, and Austen." American Society for 18th.c. Studies, Portland, OR, March 2008. Also, roundtable discussion: "Poetry, Technology, Canonicity."
- "Trees Talk Back." ASECS, Atlanta, March, 2007.
- "Improvement and Oak Exceptionalism, 1653-1781." ASECS, Montreal, April 2006.
- "John Evelyn's Sylva and the Political Agenda of Natural History." ASECS, Las Vegas, April 2005.
- "Sylva: One Hundred Years of Natural History." DeBartolo Conference on Eighteenth-C. Studies, February 2005.
- "Charlotte Smith and 'The Swallow': Migration and Romantic Authorship." Presented by invitation to the Southern California Eighteenth-Century Studies group, January 2003, and to the Berkeley Eighteenth-Century Studies Working Group, November 2002. Also presented by invitation to the UCSB Department of History Gender Studies group, March 2003. A shorter version was delivered at the Northwest Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Seattle, November 2002.
- "The 'window in the breast': Gender and Epistolarity in Wright of Derby's Early Candlelight Studies." American Society for 18th-C. Studies, April 2000.
Current Projects
"British Silva Culture: Trees and Forests in Long-Eighteenth-Century Literature."
This is the first book-length study of trees in the cultural media of the 1650s to the 1820s. Chapters examine how trees and forests were represented in poetry, novels, travel narratives, natural-history writing, silvicultural manuals, and the visual arts, in the context of the material history of timber management and public and private land ownership. At the same time that Britain's forests at home and abroad were being managed for increased timber production, named "pet" trees and forests became repositories for new kinds of affect and new models of literary authority. Representations of trees and forests underwrote the construction of national and personal identities in literature and culture, and grounded philosophical and political debates about utilitarianism and other modes of value.
Recent Courses Taught
- "Writing 'Nature' in the Eighteenth Century"
- Making Up Monsters
- "Natural Representations: Wordsworth, Dickinson, Bishop"
- Poetry and Print Culture, 1650s-1750s
- Women Writers, 1650s-1760s: English 114EM
- Epistolary Fictions
- Natural Histories: Landscape and Literature in the Eighteenth Century
- The British Gothic Novel, 1760s-1830s
- Survey: British Literature, 1660-1780: English 102