Hilary Emmett

Hilary Emmett

Dr

  • 2.09 Arts and Humanities Building

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

Transnational American studies; Nineteenth-century American literature; Comparative Australian-American literature; Childhood studies and children's literature; Disability studies

Personal profile

Biography

Hilary Emmett joined the School of American Studies in 2012, having studied and taught at universities in Australia and the USA. Her research engages a variety of fields from the literature of the early American Republic to nineteenth and twentieth century children's literature. She has also published widely on topics related to American Studies pedagogy, most recently on post-pandemic pedagogy in her co-edited collection (with Christopher Lloyd), The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies (Routledge 2023). Her current teaching and research focus is on transnational American Studies and the transpacific relationships apparent (and not so apparent) in cultural texts of the United States and Australia.

EDITED BOOKS

Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: The Monthly Magazine and Other Writings 1789-1802. Co-edited with Matthew Pethers and Leonard von Morzé. Forthcoming with Bucknell University Press (2024).

A Juvenile Miscellany: An Anthology of Lydia Maria Child’s Writing for Children. Co-edited with Thomas Ruys Smith, with an Introduction by students in the Department of American Studies, UEA. Boiler House Press (2023).

The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies. Co-edited with Christopher Lloyd. (Routledge, 2023).

Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, by Margaret Sidney. Co-edited with Thomas Ruys Smith, with Introduction and Notes by students in the Department of American Studies, UEA. Boiler House Press (2022).

What Katy Did, by Susan Coolidge. Co-edited with Thomas Ruys Smith, with Introduction and Notes by students in the Department of American Studies, UEA. Boiler House Press (2021).

 Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. Co-edited with Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019).

ARTICLES

Co-authored with Clare Corbould. “Setting Sail with Jasmine Togo Brisby” Art News New Zealand (Spring, 2022): 82-87.

Co-authored with Clare Corbould. "Playing in the Dark Archive: Confronting the Global Legacy of Slavery” Griffith Review 76 (2022): 84-96. https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/playing-in-the-dark-archive/

“Teaching Transnational Morrison: Curation and Comparative American Studies” in Comparative American Studies 19.1 (2022): 81-96. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14775700.2022.2071069

Co-authored with Clare Corbould. “Australian Afterlives of Atlantic Slavery: Belatedness and Transpacific American Studies.” Journal of American Studies Forum “American Cultures: The View from the Pacific” 52.3 (2018): 602-617. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818000865

“Between Girls: Lateral Discipline in Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom.” English: Journal of the English Association Special Issue “The Classroom of Literature” 66.254 (2017): 242-260. https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efx024  

“Prophetic Reading: Sisterhood and Psychoanalysis in H.D.’s HERmione” in Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 14.3&4 (2016): 261-276. Online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2016.1267324

“Brownian Motion: Directions in Charles Brockden Brown Scholarship” in Early American Literature 50.1 (2015): 205-221. Online. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/572093

“One of these things (is and) is not like the others: Comparative Australian-American Studies and ‘Enchanted’ Pedagogy.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 33.2 Special Issue: “Pacific Triangles” (December 2014): 121-37.

“Hidden in Plain Sight: Taryn Simon’s American Index,Eyeline Arts Journal 72 (2010): 53-55.

“The Other Charlie Brown: Early American Studies in Australia” Common Place: Journal of the American Antiquarian Society 9.3 (April 2009). Online. http://www.common-place.org/vol-09/no-03/emmett/

“‘My business is circumference’: A meditation on scission, locution, confession.” The Bible and Critical Theory 4.2 (June 2008). Online. http://novaojs.newcastle.edu.au/ojsbct/index.php/bct/article/view/200/184

“Rhizomatic Kinship in Kim Scott’s Benang.” Westerly 52 (2007): 165-173.

 

BOOK CHAPTERS

“Introduction” (with Christopher Lloyd) and “Coda; or, Where do we go from Here?” forthcoming in Christopher Lloyd and Hilary Emmett (eds) The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies (forthcoming from Routledge, 2023).

“On Felons and Fallacies: An Antipodean Reading of Edgar Huntly,”  in Philip Barnard, Hilary Emmett & Stephen Shapiro (eds) Oxford Handbook to Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019): 91-106.

“‘Troubling Language’: Storytelling and Sovereignty in Kim Scott’s Benang,” Nicholas Birns et. al. (eds), Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literatures (New York: MLA Options for Teaching, 2017): 165-176.

“The ‘Willful’ Girl in the Anglo-World: Sentimental Heroines and Wild Colonial Girls 1872-1923” in Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World: Historical Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 201-217.

Beloved Revisited” in Kerstin Shands and Giulia Grillo Mikrut (eds) Living Language, Living Memory: Essays on the Works of Toni Morrison (Huddinge: Södertörns Högskola, 2014): 95-106.

“The Maternal Contract in Beloved and Medea,” in Anne Simon and Heike Bartel (eds), Unbinding Medea: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Classical Myth from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Oxford: Legenda Press, 2010): 248-260.  

“‘Mute Misery’: Speaking the Unspeakable in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne Books,” in Holly Blackford (ed.), The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables (Calgary UP, 2009): 81-104.

“Lost Mothers and ‘Stolen Generations’: Representations of Family in Contemporary Aboriginal Writing,” in Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeanette Corbiere Lavell (eds), Aboriginal Mothering: Oppression, Resistance, Rebirth (Toronto: Demeter Press, 2006): 224-238.

 

BOOK REVIEWS & REFERENCE ARTICLES

 The South Seas: A Reception History from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour, by Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015). Journal of American Studies 50.3 (2016).

"Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker". The Literary Encyclopaedia. Online. http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5441 

Identity in Place: Contemporary Indigenous Fiction by Women Writers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by Paula Anca Farca (Peter Lang, 2011). Reviews in Australian Studies 8.3 (2014). Online. 

Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous Peoples in America and Australia, 1788-1836 by Lisa Ford (Harvard UP, 2010). Reviews in Australian Studies 6.1 (2012). Online.

Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women by Barbara Sicherman (UNC Press, 2010). Script & Print 35.4 (2011): 243-246.

The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture by Lauren Berlant (Duke UP, 2008). Australasian Journal of American Studies 29.2 (2010): 112-14.

 

Key Research Interests

Hilary Emmett’s research interests cover a variety of topics in American Literature informed by a range of approaches including comparative literature and transnational studies, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, and childhood studies. 

Teaching Interests

Hilary Emmett teachers courses in American literature from the colonial period through to twenty-first century, with a particular focus on transnational American studies.

Current courses are:

  • Transatlantic Literatures
  • Writing and Publishing Children's Literature: From Little Women to Barefoot Boys
  • Race and Resistance

Key Responsibilities

Hilary Emmett holds a University Teaching Fellowship aimed at developing inclusive pedagogies and is currently the Disability Liaison Office and Widening Participation Champion in AMA. She has served in a variety of roles in the School including Director of Admissions; Co-Lead of the Athena SWAN committee; Director of Learning and Teaching; and Director of Year Abroad Dissertations. She served as the HUM representative on the university-wide committee for UEA's 50th Anniversary celebrations. 

Areas of Expertise

Transnational American studies; Literary and cultural studies pedagogy; Inclusive pedagogy; Australian studies.