Emma Davenport: “Poetry as Labor: Toru Dutt and Paradise Lost”

Colloquium in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Literature

Emma Davenport is an assistant professor of English at Emory University, where she specializes in Victorian literature and culture. Her areas of theoretical expertise include novel theory and critical legal theory. She also teaches Anglo-American law and literature, literary and cultural theory, and the history of the novel. Her current research focuses on the intersection of nineteenth-century novels and legal theories of contract. Reading literature, law, and political theory together, she traces how the Victorian novel challenged liberalism’s insistence that contractual agreement enacts willed consent. An article drawn from this research appears in Victorian Studies.

Dr. Davenport's lecture is supported by the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts and the English Department’s Rodney Baine Lecture Fund. The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a reception in the Park Hall Library.