Dr. Jessica Richard

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

• NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations Grant, $60,000, Principal Investigator, 2022.  Maria Edgeworth Letters Project.
• 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.
• “Cultivating Virtue by Reading Jane Austen” in Cultivating Virtue in the University: Perspectives from History, Literature, Philosophy, Theology, and the Social Sciences.  Edited by Michael Lamb and Jonathan Brant. Oxford University Press, 2022.  213-225.
• “’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