Mariam Wassif

Assistant Professor of English

Area of Study

Literary and Cultural Studies

Bio

My work focuses on rhetoric, race, and material culture in the long eighteenth century and Romanticism. 

My current book project “Poisoned Vestments”: Rhetoric and Material Culture in Britain and France, 1660-1820, identifies an encounter between ancient rhetoric and commercial modernity across the canonical genres of the period, including poetry, drama, satire, and prose. I argue that rapid political, economic, and environmental change propelled major authors (Milton, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron, Austen, and Wheatley Peters) to restyle the classical trope of figurative language as the “dress” of thought. Adopting a feminist and decolonial perspective, “Poisoned Vestments” promotes our understanding of the inter-animating relationship of rhetoric and history.

In my public-facing work, I am a Communications Director for the Keats-Shelley Association of America and a co-administrator of the Woman of Colour anti-racist pedagogy Facebook group. 

I spent many years teaching in France, first  at the ENS de Lyon and later as Research and Teaching fellow (2017-21) and full-time instructor (2021-22) at the University of Paris 1- Panthéon-Sorbonne. 

Read more about me here:

https://mariamwassif.wixsite.com/website

Education

PhD, Cornell University
BA, The University of Georgia

Research

Romanticism and the long 18th century

Publications

Single-Authored Journal Articles

“Teaching Romantic Rhetoric and Classical Influence in Austen’s Persuasion,” In “Romanticism and Elsewhere,” a special issue of Romantic Circles Pedagogies Commons, ed. Stephanie Youngblood, forthcoming 2023.

“Olivia Fairfield’s ‘far surveying’ Eye: Distance and Intimacy in The Woman of Colour,” Romanticism on the Net, forthcoming 2022.

“The Romantic and Contemporary Woman of Colour—A Roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808): Pedagogic and Critical Approaches,” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment, vol. no. 2 (Spring 2021), https://www.srejournal.org/2021/03/16/the-romantic/.

“’Silken Dalliance’: Fashion and Rhetoric in Byron’s Dramas and the Letter to Murray,” European Romantic Review, vol. 31, no. 1 (February 2020), pp. 37-65.

 “Wordsworth’s ‘Poisoned Vestments’: Classical Rhetoric and Material Culture in the Poetry and Prose,” Philological Quarterly, vol. 98, no. 4 (November 2019), pp. 383-408.

 “Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ and Byron’s Portraits,” The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 49, no. 1 (February 2018), pp. 53-61.

Chapters in Edited Collections

“The Long Abolition: Literature and Material Culture Around 1807,” Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1800s, ed. Andrew Stauffer, under contract at Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023.

“Emma, the Classics, and Empire,” Austen After 200: New Reading Spaces, ed. Annika Bautz, Daniel Cook, and Kerry Sinanan, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2022.

Edited Collections

New Essays on The Woman of Colour (1808), eds. Nicole Aljoe, Kerry Sinanan, and Mariam Wassif, Eighteenth-Century fiction, forthcoming Winter 2022/23.

Translation

French to English: Excerpt from Vie et mort de l’homme qui tua John F. Kennedy [Life and Death of the Man Who Killed John F. Kennedy] (P.O.L. Éditeur, 2020) by Anne-James Chaton, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, p. 1.