Frances Ferguson
Advisory Council member Frances Ferguson studied at Wellesley College (B.A., 1969) and Yale University (M.Phil., 1971; Ph.D., 1973), and has taught at Johns Hopkins University (1973-1977; 1988-2004; 2005-2012), UC-Berkeley (1977-1988), and the University of Chicago (2004-05; 2012-present), where she is Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor of English and the College. She has published Wordsworth: Language as Counter-spirit (Yale, 1977), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (Routledge, 1992); and Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did To Action (Chicago, 2005), as well as articles on literary theory, the eighteenth century, and Romanticism (including “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations, 1987; “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” Modern Language Quarterly, 2000; “Envy Rising: The Progress of an Emotion,”Romantic Metropolis [Cambridge U Press, 2005]; and “Dissenting Textualism,” Studies in Romanticism, 2010). She is currently working on a book on the rise of mass education in Britain around 1800 and on another project on reading and practical criticism from the eighteenth century to the present. At Princeton she is teaching a seminar under the title “Poetic Realism,” focused on the meaning of what has been called “poetic faith” and how poetry adapted to the vernacular so as to bring the world closer to its readers, speakers, and auditors. Frances Ferguson is a co-editor of Critical Inquiry.