Kimberly Latta

Assistant Professor of English

CL 509-D

Kimberly Suzann Latta is assistant professor of English and affiliated with Women’s Studies, Global Studies, and Cultural Studies. She specializes in 17th and 18th Century English and American Literature, including John Milton, and is currently finishing a manuscript entitled “Sex and Usury in English Literature, 1637-1720.” This book concerns metaphors of money and the mind as a mother in a broad variety of 17th and early 18th century broadsides, economic pamphlets, political tracts, sermons, spiritual meditations, and conduct books, as well as in the poetry and prose of John Milton, Anne Bradstreet, and Daniel Defoe, which demonstrate that the accommodation of usury to Christian charity crucially deployed gender ideology. Furthermore, the gendered discourse of usury and interest production disclosed emergent concepts of creative agency, which cannot be disentangled from concepts of capital generation during this period. Her next project, which grew up alongside this one, concerns figures of alchemical multiplication and transformation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women’s mystical writings.

Professor Latta has received Ahmanson-Getty and Folger Shakespeare library fellowships to pursue research in gender, economics, and Protestantism, and has published fruits of that labor in Eighteenth-Century Studies, ELH, JEMCS, and in books from the University of Toronto and the University Press of Kentucky. She founded the interdisciplinary Pittsburgh Group for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which incorporates faculty from multiple universities in the area, and has served as the co-chair of the Women’s Caucus for the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Research and Publications:

“‘Wandring Ghosts of Trade Whymsies’: Projects, Gender, Commerce and Imagination in the Mind of Daniel Defoe” The Age of Projects, ed. Maximilian Novak, University of Toronto Press 2007
Guest Editor, “New Feminist Work on Epistemology and Aesthetics,” a special issue of Eighteenth Century Studies, 39.3 (Spring 2006) “Introduction”
“Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton,” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 11 (2005)
“Projecting: Alchemy, Capitalism, and Creativity,” Center & Clark Newsletter 43 (Spring 2004)
"Aphra Behn and the Roundheads," JEMCS 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004)
“The Mistress of the Marriage Market: Gender and Economy in Defoe’s Review,” ELH 69 (2002):359-383
"Such is My Bond: Maternal and Paternal Debt in Anne Bradstreet," Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865, ed. Carol Barash and Susan Greenfield (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998)