Jillian Heydt-Stevenson holds a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Department of Comparative Literature and Humanities. Her research interests focus on British and European literary Romanticism, visual culture, art theory, and feminist theory. She has written on Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fanny Burney, Bernardin St. Pierre, and Alphonse de Larmartine, as well as on the Romantic Novel, travel literature, and on theories of landscape architecture (particularly the aesthetic movement of the picturesque). Her current research interests are in material culture and history and her current book project is entitled Incandescent Things: Possessing Women in Romantic French and British Literature.

Teaching Interests

Romanticism; feminist and gender studies; Comparative and Interdisciplinary Studies; the historical novel; tourism



Recent Courses


 HUMN 4120-001: 19th Century Art and Literature


 COML 5830-002: 19th Century French and British Literature and History

Books

Co-Editor, with Charlotte Sussman. Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780-1830. Liverpool UP, 2008 Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History. Palgrave/MacMillan, 2005 Associate Editor. (Jared Curtis, Editor). Last Poems: 1821-1850. The Cornell Wordsworth, vol. 20. Cornell UP, 1999

Recent Articles

"'Launched upon the sea of moral and political inquiry': The Ethical Experiments of the Romantic Novel." Co-written with Charlotte Sussman. In Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780-1830. Ed Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, forthcoming 2008.

"'Amber does not shed so sweet a perfume as the veriest trifles touched by those we love': Engaging with Community through Things in Bernardin St. Pierre's Paul et Virginie. In Engaging Romanticism. Ed. Mark Lussier. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming 2008.

"'Changing her gown and setting her head to rights': New Shops, New Hats, and New Identities. In Women and Material Culture. Ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan. London: Palgrave, 2007. 52-68.

"’Pleasure is, and ought to be your business’: Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen’s Juvenilia." Romantic Praxis. January 2006.

"Are Those Who Are Strangers Nowhere in the World at Home Anywhere: Thinking about Romantic Cosmpolitanism." Introduction to the Special Issue on Romantic Cosmopolitanism in European Romantic Review: 16.1 (2005): 129-140. (With Jeffrey Cox)

"The Pleasures of Simulacra: Rethinking the Picturesque in Coleridge’s Notebooks and ‘The Picture, or the Lover’s Resolution.’" Nineteenth Century Prose 29.2 (Fall 2002): 23-52.

Recent Conferences & Guest Lectures

“’A goddess of four years standing! incredible!’: The Dazzling Collectibility of the Venus de Medici,” North American Conference for the Study of Romanticism Annual Conference. University of Toronto, August, 2008.

"Finding a ‘community for thoughts in physical objects’: Feminist Cosmopolitanism in Corinne, or Italy.” University of Zurich. March 2008.

“’Amber does not shed so sweet a perfume as the veriest trifles touched by those we love’: The Things that Liberate in St. Pierre’s Paul and Virginia.’” British Association of Romantic Studies/North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Joint Conference, University of Bristol, July, 2007.

“Incandescent Things in the Romantic Novel.” Romantics Group, Harvard University, April 2007.

"Italy, India, and Things in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda." MLA, December 2006.

"Sportive Ladies and Sporting Men in Jane Austen’s Fiction." The Jane Austen Society of the Southwest. Los Angeles. December 3, 2005. Keynote Speaker.

"’It Appears at once both keen and bright / And sparkles while it wounds’: Political and Sexual Humor in Jane Austen’s Novels." Politicizing Jane Austen, at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA) March 4-5, 2005.

Lecture, Providence College, Providence Rhode Island, April 2005.

"‘But I kept my eye on it; and, as soon as I dared, caught it up, and never parted with it again from that moment’: Stealing Pleasures in Jane Austen’s Juvenilia." Special Session: "Deviance and Defiance." North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Annual Conference. University of Montreal. August, 2005.

"‘Changing her gown, and setting her head to rights’: New Shops, New Hats, and New Identities in Burney and Austen." The American Society for 18th-Century Studies. Las Vegas, April, 2005.

"Dr. Cook, Le Melange, and the Old Woman: Enemies or friends to Domestic and Erotic Felicity?" MLA, December 2004. Special Session, "Ladies' Magazines, 1770-1840." British Romantic Period Division.

"The Borders of Things: Subjectivity and Material Culture in Austen and Burney." Romantic Border Crossings. International Conference on Romanticism. Laredo, Texas. October 2004.

"‘The Spring fashions are partly down; and the hats the most frightful you can imagine’: Things in the Romantic Novel." Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830 (conference co-sponsored by Chawton House Library and the Univ. of Southampton, England). July 2004; also presented at the Interdisciplinary 19th-Century Studies Conference, London, England, July, 2003.

"The Proper Lady and the Comic Woman Novelist." North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. New York, August, 2003.