Meet Dr. Lubey!

Dr. Kathleen Lubey has been a favorite at St. John’s since 2005, when she first began teaching here. She focuses on eighteenth-century British literature and culture; history of the novel; sexuality and gender studies; history of pornography; and literary theory, especially theories of form. Before arriving at St. John’s, Dr. Lubey taught two courses at the University of Pennsylvania while on a postdoctoral fellowship in 2008-9, and she also taught at Rutgers while she completed her doctorate. She also holds an M.A. from SUNY Buffalo and a B.A. from Ithaca College, both in English.

On the docket of Dr. Lubey’s courses are The Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, Seminar courses in Rape in the British Literary Tradition or Eliza Haywood’s Eighteenth Century for undergraduate students, and Aesthetics, Erotics, and The Eighteenth-Century Imagination, The Novel to 1800 , and Theory of the Novel among others for graduate students. Her favorite class to teach is the Eighteen-Century Novel. She says, “The novel emerges as a genre in this period, and I find it exciting to acquaint students with the cultural importance of the form, and the excitement it produced for readers of that historical period (who often weren’t sure if the books were fiction or ‘real stories’ of actual people, who previously hadn’t read books about common people, and who looked to these books for guidance on how to live their own lives).”

Check out Dr. Lubey’s upcoming book Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 which will be published through Bucknell University Press and released in September. Her work has also been published in such notable journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies (2006) and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2008). Her favorite books to read are Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, which Dr. Lubey says “just might be the most perfect book ever.”

Outside of the classroom, Dr. Lubey enjoys cooking! Her favorite meals range from the very posh duck leg confit or whole grilled branzino with lemon juice and olive to oil, to roast chicken with a green salad and potatoes cooked in the chicken fat, or an omelette with feta, to mozzarella sticks or a mountain of nachos (including the kind made with fluorescent orange cheese product). Salty food = good food. Dr. Lubey also enjoys browsing and shopping the Union Square Greenmarket. She describes herself as “passionate about film” and is interested in learning more about the history of cinema. Dr. Lubey enjoys staying active with yoga and spin classes, and she cycles regularly during the summer. She also loves to travel abroad at least once a year “to revive, refresh, and (you guessed it) eat.”

When asked what advice she would offer her students, Dr. Lubey says, “Ask questions–of texts, of professors, but most importantly of yourself. Let texts jar your assumptions about your tastes, beliefs, and ethical perspectives. Allow texts to show you the limitations of what you know and understand, even what you like, and push back those limits with each book you read. This is the beauty of the English major, to spend four years in such an intense engagement with written work.”