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Robert Mayer

Professor
Director, Screen Studies Program
PhD, Northwestern University


Areas of Interest & Expertise

  • British literature in the long eighteenth century (1660-1830)
  • The early British novel
  • Early modern British historiography
  • Defoe
  • Scott
  • Film
  • Eighteenth-century fiction on screen
  • Authorship and literary authority  

Recent Upper Division & Graduate Courses Taught

Upper-Division Classes:  

  • Criticism (Critical Theory)
  • History of International and American Cinema
  • British Novel, 1700-1800
  • British Literature, 1600-1800
  • History of American Cinema
  • Criticism; History of World Cinema
  • Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies.

Graduate Seminars: 

  • Writing the City:  Representations of London in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
  • Theories of the Novel
  • The Eighteenth-Century Novel and Scott

Seelcted Publications

 

Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen,  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

History and the Early English Novel:  Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; reprinted in paper, 2004.

"Not Adaptation but 'Drifting' :  Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship. Between Film and Literature," forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction,  July 2004.

"Did You Say Middle Class? The Question of Taste and the Rise of the Novel,"  in Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12 (1999-2000), 277-307.

"The Illogical Status of Novelistic Discourse:  Scott's Footnotes for the Waverley Novels," ELH, 66 (1999), 911-937.

Honors & Offices

  • University Distinguished Faculty Award, Fall 2003
  • Chair, Oklahoma Humanities Council (2002-2004)

Recent Grants & Research Trips

  • OSU Arts and Sciences Research & Travel Grant, 2006 (Edinburgh)
  • University Sabbatical, 2005 (London and Edinburgh)
  • Internal English Department Sabbatical (2004)
  • Arts and Sciences Travel Award, OSU, 2005
  • English Department Travel Grants (2003, 2004)
  • Internal English Department Sabbatical (2004)
  • Arts and Sciences Research Award, OSU, 1999 & 2002
  • Research Grants, Oklahoma Humanities Council, 1999
  • NEH Fellowship, Aston Magna Academy, Yale University, June-July 1997

Recent Conference Presentations

"Politics and the Elegy: The Case of Lucy Hutchinson," Poetry and Politics Conference, Stirling, Scotland, July 2006.

"Lucy Hutchinson's Autobiographical Career," American Sociery for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Montreal, March 2006.

Commentary, "Robinson Crusoe" What's the Word? MLA radio series (Sally Placksin Producer) (aired 2005 on NPR)

"The Mediterranean as Therapy:  The Travels of Smollett and Sterne in Southern France ," Society for French Historical Studies, Paris, France, June 2004.

"Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Space, Robinson Crusoe and Defoe's Tour," International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Los Angeles, August 2003.

Roundtable Participant, "Eighteenth-Century Historiography and Fiction," American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Colorado Springs, CO, April 2002.

Current Research & Projects

Two projects are nearing completion: a festschrift for Everett Zimmerman that I have edited with Lorna Clymer, Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century, is forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press, and my essay on a seventeenth-century woman writer, "Lucy Hutchinson: A Life of Writing," is forthcoming in The Seventeenth Century.  I am also working on a book-length study of letters written by and to Walter Scott that derives from research I have done over a number years in the archive of letters to Scott held by the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.  The book is tentatively entitled: “Reading and Tactics: Walter Scott’s Literary Correspondence.” 


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English Department
College of Arts & Sciences
Oklahoma State University
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Stillwater, OK 74078
Phone: 405-744-9474
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