Jennifer Frangos, Assistant Professor of English, (A.B. cum laude in English and Women’s Studies, Vassar College, 1990; M.A. in English, University at Buffalo, 1994; Ph.D. in English and Women’s Studies, Stony Brook University, 2001). Eighteenth-century British literature and culture; history of sexuality; feminist theory, queer theory; cultural studies, Transatlantic studies.  Editor, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

My current research explores what Eve Sedgwick has called “perverse histories and local possibilities” by tracing available tropes for understanding and enacting sexual desire between women in eighteenth-century British print culture. Knowledge about and the practice of sexual relations between women was of course influenced by larger social contexts, and this project tracks the ways in which the discourse of female sexualities interacted with and ran counter to broader normative conventions, demonstrating how the circulation of these tropes in the work of writers including Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Henry Fielding, and John Cleland resonates within a complex network of discourses, including legal and medical definitions of the human body; cultural conceptions and regulatory frameworks surrounding sex and sexual practice; the emerging middle-class and the institutions of courtship and marriage; the political valences of satire; and, not least, the developing category of “literature” itself. I am also co-editor of a collection entitled Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century (forthcoming, 2010).