Lindsey Eckert

Associate Professor

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Romanticism, history of the book, history of text technologies, digital humanities

LINDSEY ECKERT, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Toronto; M.Phil., University of Cambridge; B.A., Kenyon College. Dr. Eckert’s research and teaching focus on the intersections between British Romanticism and media history. Dr. Eckert is interested in how Romantic literature was shaped by rapidly changing technologies at the turn of the nineteenth century, and she works across literary genres (poetry, novels, biography) and didactic texts (especially almanacs and pocketbooks).

Dr. Eckert’s first book The Limits of Familiarity: Authors and Romantic Readers will be published by Bucknell University Press in 2022. Examining the cultural value of familiarity and its shifting decorous limits, this book demonstrates how fears about familiarity explicitly and implicitly shaped the content and reception of Romantic texts. The Limits of Familiarity draws on archival research from Byron’s fan mail and gossiping letters about the socialite author Lady Caroline Lamb to publishers’ archives and private manuscript books in order to examine the increasingly personal feelings that readers had for authors whom they would never meet.

Dr. Eckert’s new research project examines how the materiality of Romantic-era texts, particularly their bindings and page layout, influenced literary form and historical reading practices.

In the classroom Dr. Eckert strives to help students explore how historical text technologies connect with current debates about literature, reading, and technology. She is the recipient of the North American Society of Romanticism Pedagogy Prize and was nominated for an Outstanding Teaching Award at Georgia State University. Additionally, she is a member of the Romantic Circles Pedagogy Advisory Board and previously sat on the Executive Committee of the MLA Discussion Group on Bibliography and Textual Studies.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers (Bucknell University press 2022
“Priscilla Wordsworth’s Pocketbooks and Interfaces of Subjectivity,” RES 71.300 (2020): 508-27.
“Romanticism Bound,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 68 (2019): 102-04.
“Reading Lyric’s Form: The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals,” ELH 85.4 (2018): 973-97.
Special Issue Co-Editor, with Lissette Lopez Szwydky, “Romanticism and Technology,” Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons Journal (2017).
Co-author with Julia Grandison, “The Almanac Archive: Theorizing Marginalia and ‘Duplicate’ Copies in the Digital Realm,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10.1 (2016).
“‘I’ll be bound’: Clare’s ‘Don Juan,’ Literary Annuals, and the Commodification of Authorship,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 69.4 (2015): 427-54.
“Lady Caroline Lamb Beyond Byron: Graham Hamilton, Female Authorship, and the Politics of Public Reputation,” European Romantic Review 26.2 (2015): 149-63.