Elizabeth Neiman

Associate Professor
217  Neville Hall
Orono, Maine 04469-5752
U.S.A.

Office Telephone: 207.581.3811

E-Mail: elizabeth.neiman@maine.edu

Office Hours – by appointment

Courses Taught

Elizabeth Neiman is an Associate Professor in English and also the Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Her research interests include British Romanticism, history of the novel, feminist theory, and questions concerning humanism and its alternatives. Her first book, Minerva’s Gothics: the Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1785-1820 (2019), puts the work of popular Romantic-era novelists back into conversation with canonical writers, from William Wordsworth to Mary Wollstonecraft to Percy Shelley. She is working on a new book project titled Romantic Longings and the Novel, 1782-1861: Sensing Imagination’s Limits. Here, she hopes to illustrate that women writers of the Romantic period write novels that expose the racialized and gendered underpinnings of empathy as it was currently being defined as the capacity to feel for and with another, so as to reveal its prospects and limits—both in interpersonal relationships and in art.

Professor Neiman teaches introductory courses in both WGS and English, as well as upper-level and graduate courses in British Romanticism, the Victorian era, and feminist and queer theory. She also offers upper-level literature courses that are cross-listed with WGS and designed to draw in students from two disciplinary perspectives (both English and WGS). These courses focus on contemporary literature, by mostly cis and trans gender women, and with an intersectional lens of analysis.

Publications (Books and Journal articles)

Minerva’s “Gothic” Novels: the politics and poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1785-1820 (March 2019, University of Wales Press).

Elizabeth Neiman and Mathew Sadow. Routledge edition of What Has Been (1802) (Under Contract: project deadline October 2024)

Elizabeth Neiman and Dylan Dryer, “In Which an Academic Couple Considers a Curious Convergence of their Fields,” Lit2Lit, eds. Jonathan Alexander and Eli Goldblatt, Utah State UP, (under contract, in press).

“A Critical Turn Inwards in The Woman of Colour (1808): on Teaching Romanticism Now,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, upcoming (July 2024 issue)

Elizabeth Neiman and Yael Shapira. “Introduction: Biography and the Woman Writer Revisited.” Eighteenth- Century Studies, v. 52 (2023), pp. 291-296.

Introduction to and co-guest editor of (with Tina Morin at the University of Limerick) special issue for Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, “The Minerva Press and the Romantic-Era Literary Marketplace” 23 (summer 2020), pp. 11-20

“Painting the Soul: A Complex Legacy of Romanticism in Edith Johnstone’s New Woman Novel, A Sunless Heart, 1894.” Women’s Writing (3 June, 2017).

A New Perspective on the Minerva Press’s “Derivative” Novels: Authorizing Borrowed Material, European Romantic Review (volume 26, issue 5 September, 2015).

Publications related to work in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies

“One Site Ranks Maine Fourth for Women but there is More to the Story.” Bangor Daily News, Bangor, Maine, April 1, 2016.

“Cisgender is now in the dictionary: it reminds us to reflect on our gender.” Bangor Daily News, Bangor, Maine, July 10, 2015.

“Lessons about Gender in Dress Codes.” Bangor Daily News, Bangor, Maine, October 3-4, 2015.

Neiman, M., J. M. Logsdon, and E. Neiman. 2015. “Asexual reproduction.” Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Chichester, 2015.

“The Female Authors of the Minerva Press and “‘Copper Currency’”: Revaluing the Reproduction of ‘Immaculate-Born Minervas,’” Global Economies, Cultural Currencies of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz with Tara Czechowski. New York, AMS Press, 2012.