Dr. Kathleen Lubey
Professor
B.A., Ithaca College
M.A., State University of New York at Buffalo
Ph.D., Rutgers University
Research Focus: literature of the long eighteenth century; history of sexuality; feminist and queer theory; literary theory; theory of the novel
My research and teaching interests include the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain, sexuality and gender studies, feminist theory, the history of pornography, literature of the British slave trade, and literary criticism and theory. My book Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 (Bucknell 2012) examined the relationship between sexual representation and discourses on morality, aesthetics, and reading in a broad range of eighteenth-century texts. I am now at work on two long-term projects: a book on the history of narrative pornography from the eighteenth century to the present, under contract with Stanford University Press, and a study that asks skeptically if marriage was revered by eighteenth-century writers, as is often alleged. A special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation on the “The Novel as Theory,” which I co-edited with Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, is forthcoming in Spring 2020. Journals that have published my work include ELH, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, differences, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. In the past several years I have been awarded research fellowships by the Walpole, Beinecke, and Chawton House Libraries. I am also the chairperson of the Columbia University Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture.