Lora Geriguis Ph.D.

Education: 

• Ph.D. English Literature, University of California, Riverside. 1997 Fields: Restoration and Eighteenth Century British Literature, Colonialism and Post-Coloniality, Daniel Defoe. Dissertation: Bows Without Arrows: The Role of ‘Native Agency’ in the Travel Narratives of Daniel Defoe and Other English Texts 1668-1790 (viii, 324 leaves) 1997.
• M.A. in English Literature, University of California, Riverside. 1993. Fields: Medieval and Renaissance Drama, Restoration and Eighteenth Century British Literature
• B.A. in English, cum laude, University of California, Riverside.1991. Minor: Classical Studies

Principal Research Interests

Nature serves as much more than mere setting in literature. For example, during the long eighteenth century (1660-1815), the environment functioned as both object and subject of Enlightenment inquiry, which in turn informed the production of cultural texts, written, performed, and visual. Awareness of environmental degradation is not a 20th or 21st century development. English authors writing during the 17th and 18th centuries commented on the problems of pollution and resource scarcity. They also contemplated how human identity is distinguished from, and intersects with, the animals that they both relied upon and feared.

While ecocritics have traditionally neglected the long eighteenth century, and period scholars have marginalized environmental discourse, particularly that articulating a sense of scarcity or crisis within nature, recently, the potential for a mutualistic symbiosis between ecocriticism and pre-Romantic studies has begun to be identified. My goal is to contribute to this stream of scholarship, particularly by producing close readings of texts, by authors such as John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Barber, and Daniel Defoe, through an ecocritical lens. I am at the early stages of a book project entitled, "'Wit From Nature's Store: Reading Texts for/of Environmental Consciousness, 1653-1734."

Academic Interests/Research Area: 

• Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century British Literature
• Ecocriticism, the study of cultural representations of nature
• Daniel Defoe and his contemporaries
• Rise of the Novel and Working Class Poets
• Biblical Literature

AWARDS

• Service Learning Faculty Member of the Year (2018)
• Verla Rae Kwiram Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (2017)
• Helene Koon Memorial Prize, Honorable Mention for research by a junior faculty member. Western Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (February 2002).
• Dissertation Research Fellowship, UC Riverside (1996-1997).
• Resident Fellowship at the Center for Ideas and Society, UC Riverside (Spring 1996). 

Representative Publications

1. "Stormy Weather and the Gentle Isle: Apprehending the Environments of Three Robinsonades" (Book Chapter). Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages Cultures, and Media, a collection commemorating the tercentennial of the 1719 publication of Robinson Crusoe, edited by Jakub Lipski. Bucknell University Press, September 2020. 
2. "The 'it' and the 'Joy that Kills': An Ecocritical Reading of Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour'." The Explicator (September 2019) 1-4.
3. “Fellows Among the Bookshelves: The Royal Society’s Book-Gifting Network of the 1660s.” Special issue on "Libraries, Archives, Properties" in Pacific Coast Philology 52:2 (Fall 2017). 219-237.
4. "Transplanting the Duchess: Margaret Cavandish and the 'Chronic Dilemmas' of Literary Anthology Construction." English Studies 98:8 (October 2017). 897-916.
5. "In the Immensity of Nature Lost: Vision, Nature, and the Metaphysical in the Landscape of Richard Lewis" 'A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis.'" with Sam McBride and Melissa Brotton. Early American Literature 51:1 (2016) 41-69.
6. “’A Vast Howling Wilderness: The Persistence of Space and Placelessness in Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton” (Book chapter). Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe. Kit Kincaid, Katherine Ellison, and Holly Faith Nelson, eds. AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century, No 69. AMS Press, 2014.
7. “John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10: ‘Batter my heart, three personed God’" (Journal article). The Explicator. 68:3 (July-September 2010). 155-158.
8. “Monarchs, Morality, and English Nationalism in the Comedies of Etherege, Steele, and Sheridan” (Journal article). Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 24:1 (Summer 2009). 31-46.