Dr. Sophia Forster

Education

Degree	Major Emphasis	Institution	Year
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.