Department of English

"In my teaching, I try to give students a sense of what makes the eighteenth century exciting and relevant to our historical moment, but I also want them to see how deeply alien it was. This was a period whose technologies, belief systems, and social structures were completely unlike those that construct the modern world. Part of why I love teaching eighteenth century texts is because of that electric contact with a way of thinking that is so emphatically not our own. "

Cross Cultural Contacts; Eighteenth Century Literature

• "Person, Animal, Thing: The 1796 Dog Tax and the Right to Superfluous Things"
  Eighteenth-Century Life 33.2, Spring 2009
• "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Tahitian Jouissance"
  Romance Quarterly 54.4, 2007
• "Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century"
  Romance Eighteenth-Century Life 29.2, Spring 2005

• Graduate Teaching Prize, Department of English, Graduate Student Association, University of Wisconsin, 2007
• Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2005-6
• James L. Clifford Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2005-06

• Co-Coordinator, Atlantic Studies Working Group, Center for Cultural Analysis, 2008-

• "Lynn Festa: New Faculty Profile" by Michael McKeon
  (Future Traditions Magazine, Issue 2)