Taylor ROUSSELLE
Enlightenment women’s literature; metaphysics; gender & queer theory; Margaret Cavendish; Bluestocking Circle
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.
M.A. Western University, 2021
B.A. (Hons.) Western University, 2020
- 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