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BA, MA, PhD York

Katherine Binhammer specializes in eighteenth-century literature and cultural studies. Particular areas of expertise include: narrative theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the cultural history of capitalism.  She has recently taught such graduate and undergraduate courses as “The Global Eighteenth Century,” “The Transatlantic Novel,” “Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing.”

 

Representative Publications:

“The Economics of Plot in Camilla.”  Studies in the Novel.  43.1 (Spring 2011): 1-20.   

“The Failure of Trade’s Empire in The History of Emily Montague.”  Eighteenth-Century Fiction.  Special Issue on Trade.  23.2 (Winter 2010-2011): 293-317.

 

The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747 - 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

"Accounting for the Unaccountable: Lesbianism and the History of Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Studies." Blackwell's Literature Compass. Forthcoming.

with Ann B. Shteir. "A Vindication and the Imperative of History: Reviving Wollstonecraft for Future Feminisms." In Feminism in the Liberal Arts: Not Drowing but Waving. Ed. by Susan Brown, Jeanne Perreault, Jo-Ann Wallace, Heather Zwicker. Forthcoming.

"The Whore's Love." Eighteenth Century Fiction. 20.4 (Summer 2008): 507 534.

"Knowing Love: The Epistemology of Clarissa" ELH: English Literary History. 74.4 (Winter 2007): 859B879.

"Female Homosociality and the Exchange of Men: The Case of Mary Robinson." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Volume 35 (2006): 221 240.

Women and Literary History: 'For There She Was.' Edited by Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood. With an introduction by Katherine Binhammer, Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy and Jeanne Wood. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003.

 

Current Work:

 

I have begun a project that investigates the inter-relations between literature and economics in the late eighteenth-century, tentatively entitled "Narratives of Economic Growth." My hypothesis is that the novel played a role in creating the cultural belief - new to the late eighteenth century - that economic growth was the norm and that an infinitely rising standard of living was possible (a belief that we are grappling with today as our current recession - defined as two quarters of zero growth - and a new awareness of environmental limits, challenge our assumption that economic growth should be a constant). This study will investigate political economy, novels by writers such as Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, and Samuel Richardson and contemporary economic theory.