Department of English

Susan Staves

Susan StavesProfessor Emerita
PhD, University of Virginia

Research Interests

17th- and 18th-century British literature, history, and legal history

Selected Publications

Books in Progress

  • "Enlightenment Foundations of Anglo-American Rights: Theory, Rhetoric, and Ridicule"

BooksA Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789 book cover

  • "A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789." 2006, Cambridge University Press.
  • Elizabeth Griffith, "The Delicate Distress." ed. Cynthia Ricciardi and Susan Staves (Lexington, Ky: University of Kentucky Press, 1997).
  • "Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833." (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 290 pp.
  • "Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration." (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 361 pp. Selection reprinted, "Literature Criticism from 1400-1800", vol. 91 (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2003), pp. 278-92.
  • "Index to the Prose Writings," Irvin Ehrenpreis, William J. Kunz, Steven Hollander, and Susan Staves, vol. 14 of "The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift", ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969).

Articles and Essays

  • "The Learned Female Soprano," Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance, and Patronage, 1730-1830. Ed. Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  • "The Puzzle of the Pox-Marked Body." A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Enlightenment. Ed. Carole Reeves. Oxford: Berg, 2010. Pp. 155-74.
  • "Women Writers and Women Novelists," forthcoming, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.
  • "Jeptha's Vow Reconsidered," forthcoming, in "Transformations: 17th- and 18th-Century Religion, Texts, Cultures. Ed. Lorna Clymer. University of Toronto Press.
  • "The Puzzle of the Marked Body," forthcoming, The Cultural History of the Body, ed. Tim Hitchcock, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
  • "Tragedy," forthcoming, Cambridge Companion to 18th-Century Theatre, Cambridge University Press.
  • "'Books without Which I Cannot Write': How Did 18th-Century Women Writers Get the Books They Read?," forthcoming, Women and Material Culture, ed. Cora Kaplin and Jennie Batchelor, Palgrave.
  • "George Lillo," "Richard Sheridan," "Anne Finch," "Susanna Centlivre," forthcoming, Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. David Scott Kasten and Nancy Armstrong.
  • " 'The Abuse of Title Pages': Men Writing as Women," A Concise Companion to the Restoration and 18th Century, ed. Cynthia Wall. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. 162-82.
  • "Behn, Women, and Society,"  Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd and Derek Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 12-28.
  • " 'Books Without Which I Cannot Write': How Did 18th-Century Women Writers Get the Books They Read?," forthcoming, Women and Material Culture, Palgrave.
  • "Wit, Politics, and Religion: Dryden and Gibbon,"  Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak. Toronto: University of Toronto Press and U.C.L.A. Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, 2004. Pp. 147-170.
  • "Women and the Clergy of the Church of England," Huntington Library Quarterly, 65, nos. 1 and 2 (2002): 81-103.
  • "Terminus a Quo, Terminus ad Quem: Chronological Boundaries in a Literary History," Women and Literary History: For There She Was, ed. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood, Newark, Del. and London: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Pp. 92-105.
  • "Charlotte Forman" and "Judith Cook Turner," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • "Judith Drake" and "Salons: England." Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment , #4 vols., ed. Alan Charles Kors, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 1: 365-66, 4: 10-12.
  • "Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility."  World Literature and its Times: British and Irish Literature – Celtic Migrations to the Reform Bill, ed. Joyce Moss and Lorraine Valestuk (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), pp. 391-402.
  • "Investments, Votes, and Bribes: Women Shareholders in the East India Company," Women and Political Writing, ed. Hilda Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 259-78.
  • "The Construction of the Public Interest in the Debates over Fox's India Bills." Prose Studies, 18 (1995): 175-98. Reprinted in "The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England, ed. Paula Backscheider and Timothy Dykstal (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 175-98.
  • "Traces of a Lost Woman," Profession (1995): 36-38.
  • "English Chattel Property Rules and the Construction of Personal and National Identity," Law and History Review, 12 (1994): 123-53.
  • "Fielding and the Comedy of Attempted Rape,"  History, Gender, and 18th-Century English Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 86-112.
  • "French Fire, English Asbestos: Ninon de Lenclos and Elizabeth Griffith," Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century 314 (1993): 193-205.

Awards

  • Mellon Emeritus Fellowship (2005)
  • Clark Professor, William Andrews Clark Library and UCLA (1989-90)
  • Guggenheim Fellow (1981-82)
  • Harvard Fellow in Law and Liberal Arts (1980)
  • American Council of Learned Societies Study Fellow (1980)
  • Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellow (1966-67)
  • Woodrow Wilson Fellow (1963-64)