Jennifer L. Airey, Ph.D.

About

Jennifer Airey specializes in restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, with an emphasis on women’s literature and theater history. Her research concentrates on depictions of gender and sexuality, and she is particularly interested in interrogating the relationship between extra-literary sources–propaganda pamphlets, circulating broadsides, and popular sermons–and British literature. Her first book, “The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage,” was published in 2012 by the University of Delaware Press, and is the first full-length study of representations of sexual violence in restoration theater and political culture. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British politics.

Her second book, “Religion Around Mary Shelley” (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), offers the first examination of Shelley’s beliefs across the length of her career. Airey foregrounds Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period, analyzing her creative engagement with the religious controversies around her and uncovering a belief system that was both influenced by and profoundly different from those of her male Romantic counterparts.

Most recently, she has published the first modern scholarly edition of Charlotte Dacre’s 1811 novel, “The Passions” (University of Wales Press, 2023). An epistolary novel about the destructive power of emotion, “The Passions” offers new insights into early feminism, romance, and early nineteenth-century religion. It is an engrossing, powerful work of literature, featuring one of the most memorable female villains of all time.

Airey is the editor of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, the first scholarly journal devoted solely to the study of women’s writings.

Awards and honors