Faculty Profiles

My research and teaching focus on the history and theory of the novel, narrative theory, and sexuality and gender, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century.

My first book, Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton, 2012), examined the theatrical ambitions of anglophone novelists (Thackeray, Eliot, James, Joyce, and Baldwin) better known for their narrative explorations of domestic and psychological interiors, tracing the novelistic aftermath of these theatrical projects to claim that these writers’ pioneering narrative techniques for representing interiority grew out of a frustrated appetite for collectivity. The book proposed that the novel, frequently taken as a proponent of inwardness, prompts us to public ways of imagining the psyche, intimacy, and sexuality. My current project, “The Erotics of Large Numbers,” explores how nineteenth-century realism (in writers like Austen, Balzac, Eliot, and Galdós) casts mass experience in eroticized terms. I argue that this eroticism—frequently but not always traumatizing—covers such disparate collective objects as the population explosion, the group identities of sexual minorities, and the statistical and sociological literature that tried to make sense of these phenomena. Parts of the project have appeared in New Literary History and The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, and (in early iterations) in Novel: A Forum on Fiction and ELH.

Other areas of interest include queer theory (especially in its intersection with the methods of literary study) and contemporary Latin American fiction. I’ve written about the former most recently in “A Few Lies: Queer Theory and Our Method Melodramas”( in ELH; an excerpted version is at The Chronicle of Higher Education) and in “Is There A Gay Literature of Poverty?” (in Politics/Letters). My contribution to Columbia University Press’s “Rereadings” series, The Savage Detectives Reread (2022), sorts through the controversies surrounding Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 novel in order to explore the book’s decentering of anglophone visions of literary prestige, and my translation of Julio Cortázar’s 1975 novella Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires was published by Semiotext(e]) in 2014. Essays about contemporary novelists like Elena Ferrante, Fernanda Melchor, César Aira, and Rodrigo Rey Rosa have appeared in Public Books, Politics/Letters, Full Stop, Reading in Translation, and ASAP/J.

Lynn Festa specializes in eighteenth-century literature and culture, with an emphasis on the role played by literature and literary form in the elaboration of categories of human difference in Britain, France and their colonies.

Her first book, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins, 2006), examined how the culture of sensibility welded the affective response to other people to broader structures of classification in order to both include and exclude individuals from the class of humanity. Her second book, Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Penn, 2019), drew on riddles, fables, novels, scientific instruments, and trompe l’oeil painting to analyze the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed. Fiction Without Humanity won the 51^st annual James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association and the Oscar Kenshur Prize for the best interdisciplinary book in eighteenth-century studies from the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University, and has been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and Public Books as well as in academic journals. With Daniel Carey, she co-edited The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory.   Festa is the author of more than 25 articles and book chapters on a wide array of topics, including slavery, human rights, it-narratives, cosmetics, and a 1796 tax on dogs. Her article, “Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” was awarded the James L. Clifford Prize for best article by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Festa teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on eighteenth-century British and French literature; the history of the novel; narrative theory; colonialism, empire and the history of slavery; travel narrative; the Enlightenment understanding of human difference; animal studies; thing theory; the history of sensibility; eighteenth-century women writers, and Jane Austen. With David Brewer, she co-taught a Summer Seminar in the History of the Book on “Books in the Larger World of Objects” at the American Antiquarian Society in 2014. She received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and the Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching at Harvard and a Graduate Teaching Prize at the University of Wisconsin. She has served as Director, Associate Director, and Director of Admissions for the Rutgers English Graduate Program.

 Festa has been the recipient of numerous national fellowships, including a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard, an ACLS Charles A Ryskamp Research Fellowship, the M.H. Abrams Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, the NEH Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and a National Mellon Fellowship. She has given more than 120 talks nationally and internationally, including the North American Scholar Plenary lecture at the Jane Austen Society of North Ameria.

Chris Iannini works on early American literature, with an emphasis on the history of natural history as a key intellectual obsession, scientific method, and literary practice in the Atlantic world from the early modern period through the mid nineteenth century. 

"Whether I’m teaching a literature or writing course, I structure it around problems and controversies that are rich with questions for which there are no easy answers. I want students to encounter uncertainty, to become curious, and then to let that curiosity drive their learning. Students also write a lot in my classes because writing is such a good tool for transforming curiosity and confusion into clear ideas, interpretations, and arguments. It’s tremendously gratifying to help students recognize that writing is not just for recording what they already know or reporting someone else’s ideas, but for exploring the boundaries of what they can think or say."