Faculty/Staff Detail
John C. Leffel
I research and teach British Literature and Culture of the Long Eighteenth Century, specializing in Empire and Colonialism (especially the history and culture of Early British India; migration and circulation; and slavery studies); Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and women writers; Material Culture and Thing Theory; and the novel. I received my Ph.D. in English from The University of Colorado at Boulder, and am currently Assistant Professor of English.
My scholarship has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Studies in the Novel, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, and other venues.
Education
Ph.D. Colorado (2013)
M.A. New York University (2003)
B.A. Michigan (2000)
Teaching
Graduate
Person/Animal/Thing
Jane Austen
The Secret Life of Things
Colonialism, Race and Gender in Eighteenth-Century British Lit and Culture
Austen and her Contemporaries
Undergraduate
Shakespeare
The Age of Sensibility
Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Intro to Film Analysis
British Literature to 1780
Intro to Drama
Intro to Poetry
Intro to Fantasy and Sci-Fi
Publications
Articles, Essays, Book Chapters
“Conjugal Excursions, at Home and Abroad, in Jane Austen’s ‘Juvenilia’ and Sanditon,” in Robert Clark, ed. Jane Austen’s Geographies (New York and London: Routledge, 2018): 28-51.
“Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800),” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 26.3 (Spring 2014): 427-454.
“‘Her diamond cross was … at the bottom of it all’: Colonial Wealth and Cultural Difference in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800),” European Romantic Review 23.5 (October 2012): 613-634.
“‘Everything is going to sixes and sevens”: Governing the Female Body (Politic) in Jane Austen’s Catharine, or the Bower (1792),” Studies in the Novel 43.2 (Summer 2011): 131-151.
“Jane Austen’s Miniature ‘Novel’: Gender, Politics, and Form in The Beautifull Cassandra,” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 32 (2010): 184-195.
“‘Where woman, lovely woman, for wealth and grandeur comes from far’: Representations of the Colonial Marriage Market in Gillray, Topham, Starke, and Austen,” in Monika Class and Terry F. Robinson, ed., Transnational England: Home and Abroad 1780-1860 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009): 208-232.
Book Reviews:
Review of Kerri Andrews, ed., The Collected Works of Ann Yearsley (Pickering & Chatto, 2014), in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (forthcoming).
Review of Sarah Raff, Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice (Oxford, 2014), in Studies in Romanticism 55.2 (Summer 2016): 295-298.
Service
Co-Director, English Dept. Distinguished Voices in Literature Speaker Series
Faculty Mentor, Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society
Chair, English Dept. Curriculum Committee
Member of the College Arts & Sciences Curriculum Committee
Member, Campus Cultural and Intellectual Climate Committee