Wendy Lee

Assistant Professor of English

Address: LC 409
Phone: 203-432-8037
Email: wendy.lee@yale.edu
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Ph.D., Princeton University, 2010
M.Phil., Cambridge University, 2000
B.A., Columbia University, 1998

My research focuses on uncooperative feelings in the long eighteenth century. More broadly, I am interested in the intersection between the history and philosophy of emotions and theories of the subject. My book-in-progress, Failures of Feeling, or the Ethics of Disregard from Mandeville to Austen, explores how literature both constructs and refuses models of interiority and intimacy. How do failures of intersubjective feeling change our protocols of reading? What models and counter-models of personhood emerge from these affective fault lines? Revisiting Enlightenment concepts of emotions, I argue that a dysphoric streak within eighteenth-century sentimental discourse articulates subjects shaped by ethical demands rather personal desires.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

-- “Resituating “Regulated Hatred”: D.W. Harding’s Jane Austen.” ELH 77 (2010): 995-1014.

-- “Passing as Korean American” in Relocating Postcolonialism, eds. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (London: Blackwell, 2002) 

-- miscellaneous contributions to The New York Times Sunday Styles          

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: On Violence (114), Eighteenth-Century British Novel (junior seminar), European Literary Tradition

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