Hannah Blanning

Hannah Blanning is a PHD candidate specializing in British and French Romantic era literature with an emphasis on gender, ethics, radical ontologies, rhetorics of the Enlightenment, politics, and histories of ideas. Her dissertation project traces how Benedict de Spinoza’s philosophy permutated as it voyaged through German Idealist thought, radical French philosophy, and British revolutionary philosophy before landing upon Germaine de Staël and Mary Shelley’s intellectual shores. She argues that Staël and Shelley played a significant role in disseminating Spinozian ideas by embodying them in literary form to posit ethical, univocal ontologies and Republicanism as a panacea to Revolutionary failure and tyranny.  

 

Hannah holds an MA of Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado and an MA of Anglophone Literature from the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, France. She is a Lore Metzger Prize recipient, a Humanities, Democracy, and Higher Education Mellon Sawyer PhD Fellow, an Engaged Arts and Humanities Cohort Scholar, and her work can be found in the Keats-Shelley Journal+ Special Issue on Commonplacing and Commonplace Books. Hannah's love of teaching and pedagogy led her to serve as the English Department’s Lead Graduate Part-Time Instructor and as a Center for Teaching and Learning Literature Lead. When she isn’t writing and teaching, she can be found imbibing art exhibits, hiking, painting, or walking her dog with her twins, Virgile and Anaïs.