Felicity Nussbaum is a specialist in British literature (1660-1800), postcolonial and Anglophone studies, and gender studies. Before joining the faculty at UCLA, Prof. Nussbaum taught at Syracuse University and Indiana University, South Bend. Her current projects include a book on the women, performance, and material practices in the eighteenth-century British theatre; and a collection of essays on The Arabian Nights in historical context. She has recently authored two essays on abolition, slavery, and the “Orient.”
Professor Nussbaum is the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press 2003), and editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press 2003). In addition, she has published Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives (Johns Hopkins University Press 1995); The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press), co-recipient of the Gottschalk Prize for the best book in its field for 1989; and The Brink of all We Hate: Satires on Women, 1660-1750 (University Press of Kentucky 1984). As co-editor of The New Eighteenth Century: Theory/Politics/English Literature ( Methuen 1987) with Laura Brown, she was instrumental in integrating theoretical work into eighteenth-century studies. With Helen Deutsch she has edited Defects: Engendering the Modern Body, an anthology of essays in the Corporealities series from the University of Michigan Press (2000).
She has been awarded numerous academic honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and an NEH Fellowship. She has also held a Marta Sutton Weeks Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, and a Rockefeller Humanist-in-Residence Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University. She is president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.