Overview

Melinda Rabb is the author of Satire and Secrecy in English Literature 1650-1750 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Miniature and the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture 1650-1765 (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Her chapters and articles on 18th-century novels, satire, drama, and poetry, and on authors including Swift, Manley, Evelyn, Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Godwin, Scott, and Defoe, have appeared in books such as Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on 18th-c. Satire (1995), A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing (2002), The Blackwell Companion to Satire (2006), Reading Swift (2008, 2015, 2018), The Cambridge Companion to Writing by Women, 1660-1789 (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019), Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (2021), British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century  (2022), The Oxford Handbook on Samuel Johnson (2022), The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels (2023), and in journals such as ELH, Modern Language Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Papers on Literautre and Langauge, Studies in English Literature, Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has edited Lucius: The First Christian King of England for The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, ed. Douglas Canfield (2000) and a special issue of Modern Language Studies titled Making and Rethinking the Canon: The Eighteenth Century XCIII: 1 (1988). She has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Eli Lilley Foundation, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, and the Winterthur Museum. She received the Clifford Prize from the Modern Language Association of America. Before joining Brown's faculty, she taught in the Humanities department at MIT. Her most recent publications draw on new research on embodiment, masculinity, and the relationship between war trauma (civil and foreign), post-memory, and literature.

Brown Affiliations

• English