Felicity Nussbaum papers (MS.2020.005)

Biographical/Historical Note

Felicity Nussbaum was born in 1944. She earned her BA from Austin College and her MA and PhD from Indiana University. She is renowned for her work on gender, life writing, theater and performance, disability, race, empire, and globalism in the long eighteenth century. Nussbaum joined the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of English in 1996. Nussbaum has also taught at Syracuse University and Indiana University, South Bend. She has published most recently an essay on 18th-century tragedy in PMLA, and her current projects include a book on Hester Thrale Piozzi, a prolific Bluestocking; essays on blackness, slavery and the Orient; and on Phebe Gibbes, a colonial novelist.

She has been awarded numerous honors, including the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award with Distinction in Graduate Teaching, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She has also held a Marta Sutton Weeks Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, and a Rockefeller Humanist-in-Residence Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University.

Nussbaum is the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press), and editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press). In addition, she has published Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives (Johns Hopkins University Press); The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press), co-recipient of the Gottschalk Prize for the best book in its field for 1989; and The Brink of all We Hate: Satires on Women, 1660-1750 (University Press of Kentucky). As co-editor of The New Eighteenth Century: Theory/Politics/English Literature (Methuen) with Laura Brown, she was instrumental in integrating theoretical work into eighteenth-century studies. With Helen Deutsch she has edited Defects: Engendering the Modern Body, an anthology of essays in the Corporealities series from the University of Michigan Press.

Nussbaum teaches courses in eighteenth-century novel and drama, cultural studies, and autobiography. Among her recent graduate seminars are "Johnson, Boswell, and the Bluestockings," "Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists," "The Literature of Abolition and Empire, 1688-1820," and "The Oriental Tale."