Elizabeth Bohls (Associate Professor)
Book in progress: "Sites of Slavery: Writing Identities in the British West Indies, 1770-1833." Explores relationships between identity, place, and gender in this economically crucial, culturally hybrid sector of the British Empire during the decades preceding emancipation. I consider histories, autobiographies, travel accounts and journals by individuals occupying diverse positions in colonial society: planters, sailors, soldiers, slaves, travelers, and wives. How did they represent the geographical and social places they inhabited – the sites of slavery? How did each writer imagine his or her relation to the center of empire, the British Isles, a site of slavery in a different sense (though imagining itself a land of liberty)? I trace these questions through key discourses of place: landscape (aesthetics), habitat (natural history), and home (gendered domesticity).
Publications include: Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) (paperback 2004, Japanese translation 2005); Travel Writing 1700-1830, co-edited with Ian Duncan (Oxford World's Classics, 2005); "Age of Peregrination: Travel Writing and the Eighteenth-Century Novel" in Blackwell Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture, ed. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Blackwell, 2005); "A Long Way From Home: Slavery, Travel, and Imperial Geography in The History of Mary Prince" in Women on the Verge of Home, ed. Bilinda Straight (SUNY Press. 2005); "The Picturesque Plantation in Matthew Gregory Lewis' Journal of a West India Planter," European Romantic Review 13, 2002; and "The Gentleman Planter and the Metropole: Long's History of Jamaica" in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1560-1840, ed. Donna Landry, Gerald MacLean, and Joseph Ward (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
