Juliet Shields (she/her)

Areas of Specialization

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic literature, the history of the novel, transatlanticism, transnationalism, women's writing, diaspora studies

Activities and Interests

I work on the on the intersections among nationality, gender, and race in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature.  In Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1835 (Oxford University Press, 2016), I examine writing by and about British migrants to North America during the politically volatile era when Britain's American colonies broke away to become the United States.  I contend that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary representations of transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the extreme tenuousness and fragility of both Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities at the time. My interest in migration also informs Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture Anglophone Atlantic World (Cambridge UP, 2021). This study examines a network of Romantic-era writers that coalesced around the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831), focusing primarily on the three writers who produced the text--Mary Prince, Thomas Pringle, and Susanna Strickland Moodie—with glances at their most vocal pro-slavery opponent, James MacQueen, and their literary friends and relatives. The History constitutes a node connecting the Black Atlantic, a diasporic formation created through the colonial trade in enslaved people, with the Anglophone Atlantic, created through British migration and settlement.

I'm also interested in women's writing and the history of the novel.  Last year I published Scottish Women's Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: the Romance of Everyday Life (Cambridge UP, 2021), which draws on my research as a Fulbright scholar at the National Library of Scotland in 2016-17.  cottish writers from Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson created the romanticized version of Scotland featuring sublime Highland landscapes, stalwart heroes, and kilted ruffians.  My research reveals an overlooked literary tradition of realistic counter-representations in works by women writers—from stories of mundane domestic life in villages where nothing ever happens to accounts of grinding poverty in Glasgow’s slums.    I've created a website introducing some of these little known Scotswomen here.  My edition of Christian Isobel Johnstone's Clan-Albin: A National Tale, the first novel about the Highland Clearances, will be published by Routledge in October 2022.