At Georgetown University, I analyzed the formation of British national identity in 19th-century novels, particularly those of Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth.
At The George Washington University, I expanded my focus to include 19th century Francophone, Hispanophone and Caribbean literature in my investigation of the literary after effects of the Haitian Revolution. The following summarizes that work and what’s to come.
Hybridity, a blending or cross-breeding of cultures, elements or race, defines both the progress and tensions of the twenty-first century.
In my master’s thesis, I look at how this uneasy relationship with racial hybridity appears in the nineteenth-century literature of Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth in her exploration and analysis of whiteness and Irish cultural and racial identity in Britain in several of her works, including Belinda, Castle Rackrent, and Ennui.
This project explores how both privacy—the state of being free from public attention or interference—has been constructed historically as a privilege granted to a very few (white, landowning men) and how secrecy became a tool that of survival for those without those legal protections of privacy.
Privacy, in eighteenth and nineteenth legal and literary rhetoric, originates from an implicit need to imagine not only a class of people who protected public judgement but also others who were without privacy and therefore figuratively and literally dispossessed of personhood and liberty.
This project begins to probe how Claire de Duras’ Ourika, the anonymously written The Woman of Colour, Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal and Alexandre Dumas’ Georges ponder the question of who has privacy after the age of revolution, particularly the Haitian Revolution, has upended who can possess power and control language around the idea of personhood and liberty.
