
Rivka Swenson
Associate Professor
rswenson@vcu.edu
(804) 827-8416
Hibbs Hall 416
Education
BA Virginia Polytechnic Institute
MFA Virginia Commonwealth University
MA, PhD University of Virginia
Research/Teaching Focus
Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature
Books
Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603-1832. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell UP, 2016. [Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850]
Ed. with Elise Lauterbach. Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2009.
Recent/Selected Publications
“‘it is to pleasure you’: Seeing Things in Mackenzie’s Aretina (1660), or, Whither Scottish Prose Fiction before the Novel?” Studies in Scottish Literature. [Symposium on “Periodization,” ed. Juliet Shields] [in press]
“Secret History and the It-Narrative.” The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820. Eds. Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. [in press]
“Robinson Crusoe and the Form of the New Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. [in press]
“The Poet as Man of Feeling.” Oxford Handbook of British Poetry 1660–1800. Ed. Jack Lynch. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. 195–209.
“Formalism, Historicism, and the Author’s Farce: Making the Modern Author in Tom Jones.” Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding. Eds. Jennifer Wilson and Elizabeth Kraft. New York: Modern Language Association, 2015. 130–37.
“History.” The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789. Ed. Catherine Ingrassia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 135–46.
Ed. with Manushag N. Powell. “Sensational Subjects,” special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54.2 (Summer 2013).
“Revising the Scottish Plot in Roderick Random.” New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: “Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared”: Essays in Honor of Jerry C. Beasley. Ed. Christopher Johnson. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2011. 177–200.
“Optics, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Gaze: Looking at Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 51.1–2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 27–43.
“‘A Soldier is her Darling Character’: Susanna Centlivre, Desire, Difference, and Disguise.” Journal of Narrative Theory 31.4 (2007): 16–43.
“Representing Modernity in Jane Barker’s Galesia Trilogy: Jacobite Allegory and the Patch-Work Aesthetic.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 38.1 (2005): 55–80.
Current Elected Positions
Liaison to Other Societies, Executive Committee, Defoe Society. 2015–2019
Board Member, Executive Committee, Scottish Literature Forum, Modern Language Association. 2014–2019 [Secretary, 2017–2018; Chair, 2018–2019]
Participation in Grant-Funded Professional Working Groups
“Anglo-Scottish Migration and Integration.” AHRC-funded research network, U of Manchester. 2013–2014.
Participation in Grant-Funded Professional Working Groups
“Anglo-Scottish Migration and Integration.” AHRC-funded research network, U of Manchester. 2013–2014.
Editorial Positions
The Scriblerian and the Kit-Kats. 2014–
Digital Defoe. 2011–
Recent External Fellowships
Lewis Walpole Library/ASECS, Yale U. 2015.
Manuscripts and Rare Books Library, Woodruff Library, Emory U. 2013.
Chawton House Library and U of Southampton, 2013.
Folger Shakespeare Library. 2012.
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. 2010.
Faculty photo by Patrick Scott Vickers – 2014