Editorial Staff

Stephanie Hershinow is associate professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York, where she focuses on the history and theory of the novel, eighteenth-century fiction, and law and literature. Her book Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel (JHUP 2019) argues that eighteenth-century novels experimented with the limits of realism through their depictions of adolescence. Her essays have appeared in NovelEighteenth Century: Theory and InterpretationStudies in Eighteenth-Century CultureRomantic Circles, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She is currently editing Jane Austen’s Emma for W.W. Norton, and her next book is a literary history of legal personhood.

Christopher Loar is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University, where he teaches literatures of the long eighteenth century from both Britain and the Americas. He has published essays on imperial military memoirs, James Boswell’s melancholy, and Robinson Crusoe’s firearms. His first book, Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650-1750 (Fordham 2014) examines the role that the concept of savagery played in this period’s fictional reimagining of political categories. His current research interests include environmental writing in the long eighteenth century, narratives of the British empire, and early modern political theory.

Denys Van Renen is an Associate Professor at University of Nebraska at Kearney, where he teaches Science Studies, long-eighteenth-century texts, and environmental humanities.  He has published in Comparative DramaEighteenth-Century Fiction, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, College Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, among other journals.  His first book, The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern English Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), foregrounds the economies of women and laborers; his second, Nature and the New Science in England, 1665-1726 (Oxford University Studies in The Enlightenment, 2018), showcases the interdependences among natural systems, aesthetic practices, and national identity.  He has also co-edited the volume, Beyond 1776 Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution (University of Virginia 2018).

Book Review Editor

Rivka Swenson is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she especially enjoys teaching transhistorical courses on forms, modes, and genres with strong eighteenth-century roots (the Robinsonade, the Gothic). Her first book, Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603-1832 argued that the aesthetic politics of Unionism shaped the form of prose narratives during this period, in conversation with the cross-media cultural conceptualization of Britishness and subnational protest as aesthetic systems. Essays have appeared in journals such as The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and collections such as The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1830 and The Cambridge Companion to “Robinson Crusoe.”

Technical Editor

Michelle Lyons-McFarland is a lecturer at Case Western Reserve University, currently teaching Professional and Technical Communication for Engineers. Her current book project, Literary Objects in Eighteenth-Century Literature, focuses on the evolving ways authors in the long eighteenth-century interacted with material culture to imbed tacit understandings about character within their texts. Her research interests include descriptive bibliography, book history, material culture, and gothic literature.

Projects Editor

Krista E. Roberts is a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Digital Defoe, she served on the editorial staff for various academic journals, including a|bAuto|Biography Studies. Through her research, she examines the construction of medical authority vis a vis the testimonies and descriptions of women, nonhuman animals, and material actants in medical texts published between 1700 to the contemporary era.

Social Media Editor

Octavia Cox

Editorial Review Board

Leith Davis
Simon Fraser University

Stephen H. Gregg
Bath Spa University

Penny Pritchard
University of Hertfordshire

Pat Rogers
University of South Florida

Janet Sorensen
University of California Berkeley

Rivka Swenson
Virginia Commonwealth University

Founding Editors

Katherine Ellison
Illinois State University

Holly Faith Nelson
Trinity Western University

Editorial Assistant

Jaimie Gleissner

Site Design 

Katherine Ellison & Keely Siciliano