English Department Faculty
Rebekah Mitsein
Associate Professor
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 2022), which won the 2022 Walker Cowen Memorial Book Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies and was shortlisted for the 2022 Kenshur Prize for the best book in eighteenth-century studies. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Romanticism, and Digital Defoe. She is currently researching how African cosmologies influenced eighteenth-century European scientific and theological debates about the nature of spirit and matter.
Publications
Books
- African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022).
Articles
- "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.