Dr. Jessica Richard
Associate Professor of English, Chair
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 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