PhD, Princeton
MA, Princeton
BA, British Columbia
Extension: 43359
Email: easton@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
I grew up in North Vancouver and studied physics and math at UBC before switching to English. In graduate school, I specialized in British literature of the period 1740 to 1830 and wrote my dissertation on cross-dressing in eighteenth-century culture and society. I picked up a deep interest in history along the way and, after holding a Killam post-doctoral fellowship in the History Department at UBC, I came to Waterloo where I teach and research eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and history.
My research combines close reading, deep archival work, and careful attention to conceptual and epistemic developments to produce new approaches to the study of communication, gender, and class in literary, periodical, and political-economic works. From “Christopher Smart’s Cross-Dressing” to “Jane Austen and the Art of Elocution,” this interdisciplinary research has crossed literary, historical, and rhetorical disciplines to generate new insights. Taken together, my research has followed three pathways, investigating labour and gender, literature and communication, and political economy and the novel.
I am cross-appointed to the History Department at Waterloo and am the principal investigator on a SSHRC Insight Grant on “Cross-Dressing in the News: Social Practice and Generic Constraint in the Times, 1785-1884.” I am a member of the Advisory Board of the Comparative Literature Department at Fordham University. In August 2004 I was a visiting Associate Professor in the Fachbereich Literaturwissenschaft at the University of Konstanz in Germany and in April 2013 I was a visiting Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Zhejiang Gongshang University in China. From 2003 to 2007 I chaired the Women's Studies Advisory Board, a university-wide committee. From 2008 to 2015 I served two terms as chair of the English Department.
Selected publications
“Smart (Studies) Now,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 57 (2024): 479-89.
Editor, with Kevis Goodman and Ian Balfour, of Geoffrey Hartman, “Trauma and Literature: The Case of Christopher Smart, Eighteenth-Century Studies 57 (2024): 531-46.
Guest editor, with Ian Balfour, of “Christopher Smart Now,” a special section of Eighteenth-Century Studies 57 (2024): 479-551.
“Jane Austen and the Art of Elocution: Discerning Feeling in Persuasion,” in Jakub Lipski and M-C. Newbould, eds., Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 307-326.
“Enlightenment and Exchange,” in “Refusing Eighteenth-Century Fictions, Part 2,” ed. Eugenia Zuroski and Manu Samriti Chander, a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction 36 no. 2 (2024): 309-314.
“Yorick’s Speech and the Starling’s Song: The Limits of Elocution in A Sentimental Journey,” in W. B. Gerard and M-C. Newbould, eds., Laurence Sterne’s “A Sentimental Journey”: A Legacy to the World (Bucknell University Press, 2021), 121-149.
“Plebeianizing the Female Soldier: Radical Liberty and The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 32.3 (2020): 427-461.
“Smart’s Professors: Birdsong and Rhetorical Agency in Jubilate Agno,” in Christopher GoGwilt and Melanie Holm, eds., Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018): 68-96.
“Christopher Smart’s Elocution,” in Reading Christopher Smart in the 21st Century, edited by Min Wild and Noel Chevalier (Bucknell UP, 2013): 63-84.
“Covering Sexual Disguise: Passing Women and Generic Constraint,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 97-127.
“Gender’s Two Bodies: Women Warriors, Female Husbands, and Plebeian Life,” Past and Present 180 (August 2003): 131-174.
“Cosmopolitical Economy: Exchangeable Value and National Development in Adam Smith and Maria Edgeworth,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 99-125.
“‘Mary’s Key’ and the Poet’s Conception: The Orphic versus the Mimetic Artist in Jubilate Agno,” in Clement Hawes, ed., Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 153-175.
“Christopher Smart’s Cross-Dressing: Mimicry, Depropriation, and Jubilate Agno ,” Genre 31 (1998): 193-243.
“The Political Economy of Mansfield Park: Fanny Price and the Atlantic Working Class,” Textual Practice 12 (1998): 459-488.
Fellowships & Awards
- SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) Insight Grant, University of Waterloo
- Outstanding Performance Award, University of Waterloo
- SSHRC Standard Research Grant, University of Waterloo
- Isaac Walton Killam Memorial Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Department of History, University of British Columbia
- Princeton University Graduate Fellowship, Princeton University
Current research
I am currently at work on two scholarly projects and welcome graduate students interested in these and other areas of eighteenth-century and Romantic studies:
The first project, supported with a SSHRC Insight Grant, maps and makes visible a wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cross-dressing practices, and the complex ways in which those practices were represented, especially in periodical reports. One of the outputs of this research is a digital humanities database: the Waterloo Cross-Dressing Archive (WXDA).
The second project traces literary responses to elocution (otherwise known as delivery), the foremost theory of communication in Britain c. 1740 to 1820. In an era of increasing print literacy, elocutionists focused on and sought to theorize the paralinguistic features of performed speech such as gesture and tone, communicative attributes shared between humans and animals.
Areas of graduate supervision
- Eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and history
- Jane Austen, Christopher Smart, Laurence Sterne, William Wordsworth
- Eighteenth-century communication, rhetoric, and media
- Political economy and empire (Adam Smith, Maria Edgeworth)
- Gender and sexuality studies; literary theory (especially Foucault)