Writing Program
Writing Program
- Abigail Zitin
- Director of the Writing Program
- Associate Professor of English
- Unit: Writing Program Office - Administration
- AbigailZitinCV_5a74ce6c29572.pdf
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Phone Number: (848) 932-9896
- Office: Murray Hall, Room 205C, College Ave Campus
- Office Hours:
Tuesday 1–2pm
- Primary Areas of Specialization: 18th-century British literature; aesthetics and visual culture
- Field of Interest: Restoration & Eighteenth Century
- About:
Abigail Zitin studies British writers, artists, and critics of the eighteenth century; she comes to Rutgers after having taught at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her current project investigates when and how the term form became meaningful as an attribute of verbal artworks, taking as its central focus William Hogarth’s 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty. Hogarth articulates a theory of aesthetic pleasure grounded in visual experience, which gives rise to the following questions: were its conclusions supposed to apply to products of the human imagination composed in language? How might literary texts have eluded the purview of a term as apparently fundamental as form? Corollary areas of interest include aesthetics and gender, both in and beyond Hogarth’s Analysis, and the cultural history of addiction as a framework for thinking about agency, psychology, and the rise of the novel.
- Book(s):
- Undergraduate Courses Taught:
- Eighteenth-Century Poetry
- Fiction/Addiction (seminar)
- Eighteenth-Century Novel
- Graduate Courses Taught:
- Taste, Value, Judgment, 1660–1800
- Other Publications:
- “Thinking like an Artist: Hogarth, Diderot, and the Aesthetics of Technique.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46.4 (Summer 2013): 555–70.
- Membership Affiliations:
- American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Education: Ph.D., University of ChicagoBA, Cambridge University (English)BA, Columbia University (Women’s and Gender Studies)
