Dr. Jessica Richard
Associate Professor of English
Contact
Email: richarja@wfu.edu
Degrees
PhD Princeton University (2002)
BA Goucher College (1996)
Areas of Interest
I specialize in eighteenth-century British fiction. I have published on gambling in eighteenth-century British culture, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and polar exploration. My current book project is on forms of knowledge in Jane Austen’s works. I am a co-editor of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project. I am the founder and co-editor of The 18th-Century Common, a public humanities web project sponsored by the WFU Humanities Institute.
Awards
WFU Humanities Institute Digital Humanities Summer Stipend, 2021.
Faculty Development Grant for Maria Edgeworth Letters Project, Fall 2019, Summer 2019.
College Collaborations Grant, WFU Humanities Institute, for ASECS presentation with Emma Skeels ’16, Spring 2015.
Reid-Doyle Prize for Excellence in Teaching, WFU, 2011.
Selected Publications
The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel. Palgrave. 2011.
Editor, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson. Broadview Editions, 2008.
“Education” in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson. Edited by Jack Lynch. Oxford University Press.
“’Putting to Hazard a Certainty’: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. 40 (2011): 179-201.
“‘Games of Chance’: Belinda, Education, and Empire.” An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts. Ed. H. Kaufman and C. Fauske. University of Delaware Press, 2004. 192-211.
“‘I am equally weary of confinement’: Women Writers and Rasselas from Dinarbas to Jane Eyre.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. 22.2(2003):335-356.
“‘A Paradise of My Own Creation’: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of the North Pole.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 25.4(2003):295-314.
Frances Burney’s “Love and Fashion”: Introduction and Electronic Text. British Women Playwrights Around 1800. April 15, 2000.
Courses Taught at Wake Forest
FYS 100 Pursuits of Happiness
WRI 111: Gambling/Writing
WRI 111: Writing About Jane Austen on Film
ENG 160: Introduction to British Literature
ENG 165: Studies in Major British Authors
ENG 190: Introduction to the Novel
ENG 300: Jane Austen’s Eighteenth-Century Contexts
ENG 300: The Age of Johnson
ENG 301/601: Jane Austen: Critical Contexts
ENG 335/635: Eighteenth-Century British Fiction
ENG 337/637: Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Literature: Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
ENG 700: Teaching Internship
ENG 733: Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: The Oriental Tale
ENG 733: Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: The Body, The Letter, The Novel
ENG 737: Education in Eighteenth-Century British Literature