Stephanie Degooyer

Biography

Stephanie DeGooyer received her Ph.D. in English literature from Cornell University in 2013. Her work focuses on the intersections of law, politics, and aesthetics in the long eighteenth century. She is currently working on a book project called Acts of Naturalization: Immigration and the Early Novel, which establishes an important connection between eighteenth-century legal theories of naturalization and the development of formal techniques to introduce new subjects in the novel. Most recently, she completed an article on the politics of national borders in Adam Smith and the sentimental novel for English Literary History as well as “The Poetics of the Passport,” an article on eighteenth-century passport restrictions and narrative fiction. She is also co-author of The Right to Have Rights with Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell and Samuel Moyn (forthcoming from Verso Books in January 2018). Her teaching at Willamette University covers survey courses on Eighteenth-Century British literature, as well as more specialized courses on Realism, Empire, Literary and Critical Theory, and Laurence Sterne.

Research Interest

 intersections of law, politics, and aesthetics