Small, glass alembic, Maker unknown, 18th Century, Science Museum Group London, UK
I am interested in how gender and race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and our own can be mapped across British literature, sugar, teapots, patch boxes, sculptures, portraits, and contemporary adaptations of regency-era narratives. I am currently writing a book (Gender, Sugar, and the Afterlives of Abolition), co-editing a book series for Oxford University Press (Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture), and am under contract to edit the Norton Library edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
Gender, Sugar, and the Afterlives of Abolition
Gender, Sugar, and the Afterlives of Abolition is a Black feminist analysis of England’s abolitionist campaign and its influence on current representations of race and gender. It brings together eighteenth and nineteenth-century literary texts, medical diaries, domestic objects, portraits, and contemporary film, sculpture, and portraiture to show how essential Black women and men as philanthropic objects have been to white women’s political progress. The book moves between the late eighteenth and twenty first centuries and among British abolitionist culture, accounts of West Indian plantation life, and contemporary Black art. It revolves around sugar. As a commodity, a trope, a signifier of social mobility, and an object of protest, the substance that sweetened tea is central to two cultural moments that span time and geography—Britain’s abolitionist movement and twenty and twenty-first repurposing of its dominant tropes. (Princeton University Press, advance contract)
Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Oxford University Press
Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture is a book series that attends to the racial and imperial logics that structured the conceptual and material worlds in which literatures of the long nineteenth century emerged. The series opens up a space in which to consider the complex relationships between, on the one hand, such issues as the popularization of race science and the ecological consequences of rapid colonial expansion and, on the other hand, literary production and consumption across what Pascale Casanova has termed “the world republic of letters.” While centered on literatures and cultures of the late-Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian eras, our series pays particular attention to the durability of long nineteenth-century racial and imperial formations in the contemporary moment. Titles included will proceed from the conviction that understanding this key moment in the history of race and empire enables us to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the structures we have inherited from the nineteenth century.
Jane Austen Editions
I am currently working on editions of three Austen novels for Penguin Random House (Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice) and the Norton Library (Mansfield Park). The Penguin Random House editions will be available in September 2025. For more about my approach to the Norton edition, see “Jane Austen and the Abolitionist Turn” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language.