Lindsey Eckert

Timothy Gannon Associate Professor

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

LINDSEY ECKERT, Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English, 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 book history. She 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: Authorship and Romantic Readers (Bucknell University Press 2022) was runner-up for the British Association of Romantic Studies First Book Prize. The book draws on a wide variety of archival research from Byron’s fan mail to publishers’ papers to manuscript albums in order to examine the increasingly personal feelings that readers had for authors whom they would never meet. Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, The Limits of Familiarity encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling too much.

Dr. Eckert’s new book project examines how the commercialization of bookbinding in the Romantic era fundamentally changed the literary marketplace. This new work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Bibliographical Society of America, and in 2024 she received FSU’s Developing Scholar Award.

In the classroom Dr. Eckert strives to help students explore how historical text technologies connect with current debates about literature, reading, and writing. 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. She previously served on the Romantic Circles Pedagogy Advisory Board and 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)
“Bookbinding and the Look of the Romantic-era Novel,” Studies in the Novel (forthcoming)
“Lady Caroline Lamb’s Recuperative Materiality,” Studies in Romanticism 60.4 (2021): 451-66.
“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.