What Are You reading?: Kate Singer
The Communications Fellows are excited to relaunch the K-SAA Blog’s “What Are You Reading?” series! Started by the 2019 Comms Team, this series aims to spotlight the research of our community members and encourage conversation around recent publications in the field. Please reach out to us if you have someone you would like to see interviewed!
Kate Singer is the Mary Lyon Professor of Humanities in the English Department and affiliated faculty in the Critical Race and Political Economy Department at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation (SUNY Press, 2019), co-editor, with Ashley Cross and Suzanne L. Barnett, of Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things (Liverpool University Press, 2020), and co-editor, with Omar F. Miranda, of Percy Shelley for Our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She has published essays on Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Maria Jane Jewsbury, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Robinson, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Prince. She is working on a second book that explores tropes of shapeshifting in the Romantic period and beyond and currently serves as President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
What new studies of Romantic-era literature are you currently reading?
I’ve been reading Caroline Gonda & Chris Roulston’s Decoding Anne Lister — a really great collection of essays on Lister, thinking about everything from their scientific research into sex and sexuality, the coding of her diaries, her scientific research, and more. I’ve also been penguin walking my way through Byron and Translation edited by Maria Schoina and John Havard after hearing a really thought-provoking paper by Maria Schoina on Byron at MLA. Also Greta Le Fleur &c.’s Trans Historical and Declan Kavanagh’s Effeminate Years, Eileen Hunt’s The First Last Man, Sharon Ruston’s The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein. And dreamily sinking into Amelia Worsley’s incredibly erudite and echoic Singing by Herself.
Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?
I’m working on an essay on ideas of fluid and fluidity in the period, with an ending section on Lister and have been really fascinated by her own research into embodiment and her interest in chemistry. Ruston’s work on chemistry is paramount, and I love reading how she understands the various debates about vitality, transformation, and state changes. I love how Le Fleur & company think about historicity in the introduction to their volume and have been teaching that the past few semesters.
I’ve been trying to bone up on my Byron a bit for an article that Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud and I are writing on Sardanapalus and its formulations on what we might call queer and trans gender. I love how reading a less read work such as Sardy or Deformed Transformed can help to redraw an author and see him differently. I think there’s more work to be done on Byron’s queerness and its influence on queer stories in the transatlantic popular press, including female husband stories, female sailor and solider tales, and other cross-gendering narratives, which I’ve been reading and researching for my book on shapeshifting.
What books are in your ‘to read’ pile right now?
Dionne Brand’s Salvage, Melanie Yergeau’s Authoring Autism, Therí Pickens’ Black Madness::Mad Blackness, and a bunch of other disability theory for a project I’m working on about neurodivergence in the period with Emily Stanback and Fuson Wang, The Jasmine Throne, and The Lost Girls and The Last Night at the Telegraph Club for an independent study on YA novels and queer childhood. Also rereading “Whiteness As Property” for a seminar on the topic led by Tricia Matthew.
Which book(s) do you most frequently recommend to your students?
Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson’s Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century
Le Fleur et al’s Transhistorical
Have there been any articles or publications recently you’d like to draw our attention to?
In my actual and virtual book stack are Nick Mason’s edition of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rydal Journals and Joe Albernaz’s Common Measures. There will be special issues of Studies in Romanticism and ERR on trans studies and Romanticism coming out this spring edited by Libby Fay and myself respectively with amazing essays from early career scholars that will be well worth reading. And everyone should check on the last volumes (4&5) of Longman’s The Poems of Shelley. I’m excited for Volume 4 of the Johns Hopkin’s The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley in November.
