Projects per year
Personal profile
Research interests
I study African American and U.S. literature of the long 19th century, always with an eye toward the relay between racialized formations of the human and the aesthetic. I have written on literary and historical figures including Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Benjamin Rush, Richard Allan, Absalom Jones, David Walker, Nat Turner, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Jacobs. I’ve also explored the archives of Atlantic slave trade, late eighteenth-century yellow fever epidemics, crime writing in the popular periodical press, the penitentiary, slave revolts, and the Spiritualist movement.
My first book, Criminal Genius in African American and U.S. Literature, 1793-1845 is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. This book locates creative genius on the plantation, in the swamp, and behind bars to better account for the agency of those constitutively excluded from the liberal project. By situating the rise of Romantic-era notions of the super-agent, or “genius” within the history of criminality’s associations with Blackness, I demonstrate that, within white supremacy, an aestheticized criminality has sometimes exceeded the work of racialized oppression to which it has so often been conscripted.
I am currently working on another monograph Reading the Nineteenth Century in Black, White and Green, which adopts an environmental framework to show how aesthetic practices can sometimes preserve and perpetuate an understanding of human agency as reliant on intra-action with the nonhuman natural world. Drawing on African American literature and Africana thought, it critiques new materialist theories of nonhuman agency for their frequent occlusion of the crucial context of racialization.
I earned my B.A. at Reed College and my M.A. and Ph.D. at Princeton University and, before coming to Bristol, was Associate Professor in English and African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of Wyoming (USA).
Teaching
I teach and lecture teaching on undergraduate units including Literatures of Enslavement, Texts in a Global Context, Readings in Gender and Sexuality, Representations: This is (not) my America, Black British Literature, American Revolutions, and Celebrity Cultures. I convene a special subject on African American Literature. At the MA level, I teach on the Black Humanites MA and the English MA units 'Animal Planet' and 'The Gothic', for which I am also convener.
Structured keywords and research groupings
- Centre for Black Humanities
Keywords
- Research interests: African American and U.S. literature of the long 19th- century; literature of enslavement; new materialisms; race and environment; Spiritualism; the penitentiary; American Enlightenment/American Gothic; Harriet Jacobs; Edgar Allan Poe
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Network
Projects
- 1 Finished
Research output
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Criminal Genius: Blackness and Agency in American Literature, 1793-1845
Forbes, E., 2022, (Accepted/In press) Johns Hopkins University Press. 270 p.Research output: Book/Report › Authored book
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Our Criminals, Ourselves
Forbes, E., 2020, In: Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary Law Review. p. 95-102Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article (Academic Journal) › peer-review
Open Access -
Vegetative Politics from Crèvecoeur to Hawthorne
Forbes, E., 8 Apr 2020, In: J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. 8, 1, p. 43-66 24 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review
Open AccessFile53 Downloads (Pure)
Prizes
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1921 Prize in American Literature
Forbes, Erin (Recipient), 2016
Prize: Prizes, Medals, Awards and Grants
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Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, The Huntington Library
Forbes, Erin (Recipient), 1 Jun 2014
Prize: Prizes, Medals, Awards and Grants
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The Phi Beta Kappa Society Certificate of Appreciation
Forbes, Erin (Recipient), 2015
Prize: Prizes, Medals, Awards and Grants
Activities
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C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Erin Forbes (Speaker)
17 Oct 2020Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in conference
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American Literature Research Seminar
Erin Forbes (Invited speaker)
6 Feb 2020Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Invited talk
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American Periodicals (Journal)
Erin Forbes (Peer reviewer)
2020 → …Activity: Publication peer-review and editorial work types › Publication peer-review