Dr. Sophia Forster

 

Education

Ph.D.  English, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2008
M.A.   English, University of Victoria, 2001
B.A.    English, York University, 1998

Teaching and Research Interests

Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Late Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Selected Publications

“Labor, Slavery, and the Civil War.” The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Michael Jonik, Cambridge UP, forthcoming Spring 2026.

“Isabel’s ‘Indefinable’: The Fate of Liberal Feminism in James’s The Portrait of a Lady.” Radical Henry James, special issue of The Henry James Review, forthcoming Fall 2023.

“From Labor Reform to the Welfare State: The Critique of Capitalism in Three Postbellum Women’s Novels.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 9, no. 2, 2021, pp. 303-29. 

“The Feminine Origins of American Literary Realism.” The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism, edited by Keith Newlin, Oxford UP, 2019, pp. 65-82.   

“Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Emergence of American Literary Realism.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 48, no. 1, 2016, pp. 43-64. 

“Peculiar Faculty and Peculiar Institution: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Labor and Slavery.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 60, no. 1, 2014, pp. 35-73. 

“Americanist Literary Realism: Howells, Historicism, and American Exceptionalism.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, 2009, pp. 216-41.