Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
- Education:
- Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 1990
After teaching in Yale University’s English Department 1990-1995, I moved to UC Santa Barbara. Among courses I’ve offered here: “Writing Nature in the 18th Century”; “Performing the Restoration Playhouse”; “Going Postal: Letter-Narratives”; and “Augustan Poetry and the Public Sphere.” I’m affiliated with the Early Modern Center and the Literature & Environment initiatives in English, and with UCSB’s Environmental Humanities Center.
My research interests include theater studies, letter-narratives, and nature/culture encounters in early modern British literature. In Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (1996), I examined how epistolary novels play with and against print culture (Montesquieu, Richardson, Riccoboni, Crèvecoeur). My recent article on the French artist Sophie Calle reads her “Take Care of Yourself” project (2007) as a remediation of 18th-c. epistolary conventions.
In 2012, I co-edited the collection Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature 1660-1830. I’m currently working on a book entitled “Talking Trees: Others and Ethics in Long-Eighteenth-C. British Literature,” which considers the history of environmental ethics in writing about trees and forests. Recent articles have focused on avian migration, botany and monstrosity, and the 18th-c. global circulation of flora.
Together with several graduate researchers, I am developing the Early Modern British Theater: Access (EMBTA) project. Please visit our website, which collects resources for teaching theater studies 1500-1800, at embta.english.ucsb.edu.
Research Areas
- c. 1500-1800
- c. 1800-1945
- British Literature
- Environment and Ecocriticism
Selected Chapters
In 2012 my co-editors and I published Invaluable trees: cultures of nature, 1660 –1830. The co-edited, interdisciplinary volume is the first to deal with the material culture of trees, forests, and wood in the early modern period; it includes essays by scholars in art history, history of science, musicology, agricultural and forest history, and literary scholars working in a number of European languages. My essay in the volume, on Swift’s poem “On cutting down the old thorn at Market Hill,” argues that Swift employs a rhetorical strategy of distancing and displacement to argue for an ecocentric environmental ethics.
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Bookshelf
Courses Taught
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