Interests

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture; Disability Studies; Gender Studies; Literary Translation and Imitation; Classical Latin Poetry.

Selected Works

Loving Dr. Johnson (2005); ;Co-ed. (with Felicity Nussbaum) of "Defects": Engendering the Modern Body (2000); Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (1996)

Additional Information

Helen Deutsch teaches and researches at the crossroads of eighteenth-century studies and disability studies, with particular emphases on questions of authorship, originality, and embodiment across a variety of genres. Her ongoing research questions include the relation of eighteenth-century authors to classical models (in shaping literary style, authorial careers and gendered identities), the cultural connection between authorship and disease, the interplay between visual and printed cults of authorship, and the formative relationship between bodily difference and modern individuality. In addition to the three books listed above, some of her most recent articles have considered the gendered relationship of twentieth-century illness narrative to eighteenth-century sensibility, the formative role of disability in the construction of the eighteenth-century English canon, and the paradoxes of bodily individuality and moral exemplarity inherent in the history of the essay form from Montaigne to Randolph Bourne. Her recent graduate seminars have considered the history of the mind/body problem from the Restoration to the present and the relationship between deformity and sensibility in eighteenth-century literature. In addition she regularly teaches a senior seminar on illness narrative and disability theory. An NEH fellow in residence at the Huntington Library in the academic year 1998-9, she has served on the MLA Executive Committee of the Division of Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Literature, and is currently a Member at Large on the board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is working on a new book project on gendered subjectivity, embodiment, and intimate literary forms such as the essay and the verse epistle.

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