English Department Faculty
Rebekah Mitsein
Associate Professor; Assistant Chair
Rebekah Mitsein
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S485
Telephone: 617-552-9196
Email: mitseinr@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., St. Cloud State University
- M.A., Duquesne University
- Ph.D., Purdue University
Department
Biography
Rebekah Mitsein's research and teaching interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and transatlantic literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on how the era's global crossroads influenced European texts and thought. She is the author of African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (University of Virginia Press), which won the 2022 Walker Cowen Memorial Book Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies and was shortlisted for the 2023 Kenshur Prize for the best book in eighteenth-century studies. She is currently working on two research projects. One, The True Story of the Abyssinian Liar, is a biography of the traveler James Bruce and the Ethiopian noblewomen who authorized his entrée into the eighteenth-century court at Gondar. The other, Gold Coast Metaphysics and the Matter of Spirit, argues for the influence of African cosmologies on Enlightenment thought.
Publications
Books
- African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022).
Articles
- “The Africa Paradox: Locating Africa in Eighteenth-Century Studies,” Literature Compass 21 (2024): https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lic3.12749
- “Defoe, Africa, and the Levant,” in the Oxford Handbook to Daniel Defoe (co-authored with Manushag N. Powell), edited by Alan Downie and Nicholas Seager. Oxford UP (2023): 562-580.
- "Teaching the Eighteenth Century Beyond the Pale." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 49, 2020, pp. 131-136.
- "Reading Africa in the Contact Zone: Willem Bosman's New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea." Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World, edited by Victoria Barnett-Woods, Routledge, 2020, pp. 102-122.
- "Upon a Voyage and No Voyage: Mapping Africa's Waterways in Defoe's Captain Singleton." Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 10.1 (2018): 1-19.
- “Trans-Saharan Worlds and Worldviews in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 30.3 (2018): 340-368.
- “The Crisis of Affective Kinship in Coleridge’s Christabel,” Romanticism 24.1 (2018): 67-77.
- “Humanism and the Ingenious Machine in Richard Ligon's True and Exact History of Barbados.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16.1 (2016): 95-122.
- “‘Come and Triumph With Your Don Quixote’: or, How James Bruce Travelled to Discover the Source of the Nile but Found Scotland Instead.” Studies in Travel Writing 18.1 (2014): 1-17.
Book Reviews
- Rev. of Buccaneers and Privateers: The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675-1725, by Richard Frohock. Early American Literature 49.1 (2014): 249-51.
Web Publications
- “What the Abyssinian Liar Can Tell us about True Stories: Knowledge, Skepticism, and James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile.” The 18th-Century Common: A Public Humanities Website, 17 March 2015.