Barbara M. Benedict

Barbara M. Benedict earned her BA in History and Literature at Harvard University in 1976 and her PhD. in English at UC Berkeley in 1984. She holds the Charles A. Dana Chair of English at Trinity College, CT, where she has taught since 1984. As well as essays on eighteenth-century literature, book history and popular culture, she has published five books: Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800; Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Anthologies; and, most recently, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. She has also edited Eighteenth-Century Erotica, 1700–1800: Wilkes and the Later Eighteenth-Century, and co-edited (with Deidre LeFaye) Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

Tune in to Barbara Benedict’s episode on the Choose to be Curious podcast:

• “Curiosity and Collecting, with Barbara Benedict”

Want to teach Barbara Benedict’s Curiosity Studies chapter? Consider pairing with:

• Barbara Benedict, “Curiosity and the Occult: The Ambiguities of Science in Eighteenth-Century British Literature,” The Palgrave Handbook of Early-Modern Literature, Science, and Culture (2017); 351–73.

Read more from Barbara Benedict on curiosity!

• Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
• “‘The Curious Attitude’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Observing and Owning,” Eighteenth-Century Life 14 n.s., 3 (November, 1990): 59–98.
• “The Curious Genre: Amatory Fiction and Female Inquiry,” Studies in the Novel, 30, 2 (Summer 1998), 194–209.
• “Which was the Witch?” The Center and Clark Newsletter 34 (Fall, 1999): 5-6.
• “Making a Monster: Socializing Sexuality and the Monster of 1790,” In “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body, eds. Felicity Nussbaum and Helen Deutsch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 127–153.
• “European Monsters through English Eyes: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Icons,” Symbolism 1 (2001): 81–121. Nominated for the Clifford Prize.
• “The Mad Scientist: The Creation of a Literary Stereotype,” in Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Kevin Cope (AMS Press, 2004): 59–108.
• “Ghostly Foot-Prints: The Haunts of Meaning in Eighteenth-Century London.” Literary London, special issue of Augustan Studies, ed. Sandro Jung vol. 3, (Summer, 2005): 21–40.
• “The Spirit of Things,” The Secret Life of Things, ed. Mark Blackwell (Bucknell University Press, 2006): 19–42.
• “Displaying Difference: Curious Count Boruwlaski and Staging Class Identity,” Eighteenth-Century Life: 30.3 (2006): 82–110.
• “Curious Representations: Early-Modern Responses to Transgressions of Nature and Culture,” Ludi Naturae: Transformations of an Ancient Topos, ed. Natascha Adamowsky, Harmut Böhme and Robert Felfe (München: Willhelm Fink Verlag, 2010): 237–55.
• “Collecting Trouble: Sir Hans Sloane’s Literary Reputation in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Life (2012), vol. 36, no. 2 (Spring, 2012): 111–142.
• “Spectating Science in the Early Modern Collection,” Travel Narratives, the New Science and Literary Discourse, 1569–1750, ed. Judy A. Hayden (Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2012), 197–213.
• “Sloane’s Ranges: Sir Hans Sloane’s Literary Reputation 1685–1800,” in From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections (London: British Library Publications, 2012): 33–40.
• “Collecting.” In Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine, (New York: Cabinet Books, 2012): 484–491.
• “The Moral in the Material: Numismatics and Identity in Evelyn, Addison and Pope,” in Arts in the Age of Queen Anne, eds. O.M. Brack, Jr. and Cedric D. Reverand, II (Bucknell University Press, 2015), 65–83.
• “Curiosity and the Occult: The Ambiguities of Science in Eighteenth-Century British Literature,” The Palgrave Handbook of Early-Modern Literature, Science, and Culture (2017); 351–73.
• “Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf, Joseph Boruwlaski, A Polish Gentleman by Joseph Boruwlaski.” Disability Experiences, eds. Layman Poupard Publishing, LLC., 2018; online June 2019.
• “Curiosity in British Literature: Investigators, Curiosities, Motifs and Methods.” Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Epistemic Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity, ed. Mariana Papastephanou (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019), 67–85.