Professor Marsh studies anglophone literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, with focus on the western Atlantic history of race and slavery. In support of her book project, Novel Constitutions: Bodies of Law and Fictions of Race, 1688-1818, Professor Marsh was a Penick Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute Libraries in Washington, DC. Her other research interests include medical humanities, law and literature, and the history of the novel. Professor Marsh's classes study core humanities texts—from Plato to Saint Augustine to Jane Austen to Frederick Douglass—to explore what it means to be human. By reading these texts with charity, and in a wisdom-seeking way, her students learn how to cultivate a life of the mind as a resource for human flourishing.

Education

• Ph.D., British literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2013)
• M.A., British literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008)
• M.F.A., Poetry, University of Pittsburgh (2006)
• B.A., English with concentration in Biology, Washington & Jefferson College (2003)

Publications

• “Imoinda’s Rebellion: Sovereignty, Slavery, and the Ancient Constitution in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” ELH 90, no. 3 (2023): 639–66. [More Information]
• “‘All the Egotism of an Invalid’: Hypochondria as Form in Jane Austen’s Sanditon,” The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Maria Frawley and Cheryl Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2022), 229-45. [More Information]
• “Monsters and the Monstrous in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales,” A Cultural History of the Fairy Tale: The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Naomi Wood (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 105-22. [More Information]
• “Changes of Air: The Somerset Case and Mansfield Park’s Imperial Plots,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 53.2 (2020): 211-233. [More Information]
• “Romantic Medicine, the British Constitution, and Frankenstein,” Keats-Shelley Journal 64 (2015): 105-22. [More Information]
• “‘Consumption, was it?’: The Tuberculosis Epidemic in Ireland and Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’” Short Story Criticism 186 (2014): 213-21. (reprint) [More Information]
• “Malaria and the Revision of Daisy Miller,” Literature and Medicine 30 (2012): 217-40. [More Information]
• “‘Consumption, was it?’: The Tuberculosis Epidemic in Ireland and Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua: A Quarterly Record of Irish Studies 15 (2011): 107-22. [More Information]
• “Twice Upon a Time: The Importance of Rereading ‘The Devoted Friend,’” Children’s Literature 36 (2008): 72-87. [More Information]

Awards

• Cornerstone: Learning for Living Grant, The Teagle Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities [More Information]
• Margaret Henry Dabney Penick Resident Scholar, Smithsonian Institute Libraries [More Information]

Organizations

• American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies [More Information]
• The Jane Austen Society of North America [More Information]
• The Modern Language Association [More Information]
• Phi Beta Kappa, Washington & Jefferson College Chapter

Presentations

• “Jane Austen and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” The Jane Austen Society of North America Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, December 2019
• “Constituting Britons: Law, Medicine, and the Roots of Anglophone White Supremacy,” Slavery, Slave Trading, and Enslavement before 1700. Annual Meeting of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Orlando, FL, March 2018
• “Changes of Air: The Case of James Somerset and Mansfield Park’s Imperial Plots,” British Women Writers Conference, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, June 2017
• “‘That Mixture of Character’: Constitutional Instability in Jane Austen’s Sanditon,” Centre for Humanities and Health, King’s College London, London, UK, November 2012
• “Romantic Medicine and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Midwest Conference on British Studies, Pittsburgh, PA September 2009