Home Institution: University of Washington
Project: The Romance of Everyday Life: Scottish Women Writers, 1815-1939
Dates: December 2016 - May 2017
Juliet Shields is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature. She is the author of Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Nation and Migration: the Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1835 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her current research project, “The Romance of Everyday Life: Scottish Women’s Writing, 1815-1939,” explores a long-neglected tradition of women's writing that has been overshadowed by the historical romances of Walter Scott and the adventures stories of Robert Louis Stevenson. During her time at IASH, she will draw from the National Library of Scotland’s wealth of literary archives to reconstruct a detailed picture of the world in which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scotswomen lived and wrote, and to argue that their writing constitutes a distinct and coherent chapter in the development of the British novel that demands scholarly attention both for its literary value and its historical significance.