Dr. Jessica Richard

Associate Professor of English, Chair

Contact

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 alternative forms of education in eighteenth-century British culture. I am the founder and co-editor of The 18th-Century Common, a public humanities web project sponsored by the WFU Humanities Institute.

Awards

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.

“’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