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Taylor ROUSSELLE

Taylor ROUSSELLE
Contact Information
Email address: 
taylor.rousselle [at] mail.mcgill.ca
Address: 

Arts Building
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, QC H3A 0G5
Canada

Group: 
Doctoral Students
Stream: 
Literature
Specialization by geographical area: 
Europe
Specialization by time period: 
16th/17th-Century
Restoration
18th-Century
Area(s): 
Fiction
Poetry & Poetics
Genre Studies
Philosophical Approaches
Areas of interest: 

Enlightenment women’s literature; metaphysics; gender & queer theory; Margaret Cavendish; Bluestocking Circle

Biography: 

My current research, supervised by Dr. David Hensley, uncovers women’s contributions to the turbulent eighteenth-century metaphysical debate over the body which have been overlooked due to their being embedded in works of fiction. Reading female-authored prose from the British Enlightenment alongside various philosophical tracts and treatises, I aim to demonstrate fictive literature’s unique capacity to allow women to both express and disseminate philosophical thought without fear of repercussion for entering the “masculine” space of “serious”—that is, non-fiction—writing. It is thus my goal (and the goal of my work) to both challenge current scholarly positions on what generically constitutes the discipline of philosophy and to expose a dark history of the Enlightenment’s oppression of female intellectual voices; an oppression so powerful that it led these women to disguise their desire to transcend their physical, gendered bodies within their works of fancy.

Degree(s): 

M.A. Western University, 2021
B.A. (Hons.) Western University, 2020

Awards, honours, and fellowships: 
  • Hugh MacLennan Fellowship for the Study of English, 2023-2024
  • Helen M. B. Allison Gold Medal, 2020
  • Wade-Walters Scholarship for Excellence in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2019
  • Bounce Scholarship for Achievement in Eighteenth-Century Literature Studies, 2019
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