Kimberly Latta

Assistant Professor of English

CL 509-D

Kimberly Latta is Assistant Professor of English. She specializes in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English and American literature and feminist theory. Her interests include Milton, female mystics in Puritan and dissenting Protestant groups, natural philosophy and alchemy, theories of creativity, capitalism and reproduction in literature. In addition to guiding seminars on early modern and early eighteenth-century literature, Professor Latta also occasionally indulges her favorite pop genre by teaching classes in science fiction. She has published essays in ELH, JEMCS, and in edited books on women, religion, and capitalism in the work of Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, and Daniel Defoe. She also co-edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ECS) on feminism, aesthetic, and epistemology. She is finishing a book provisionally entitled Sex, Secularization, Commerce and Creativity in English Literature, 1637-1724. When she finishes that project, she plans to write about the public and private "maternal voice" in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's letters, diaries, and published writings.

Research and Publications: "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). Her current research interests include late seventeenth-century aesthetics, responses to commerce, and literary explorations of natural philosophy, especially late seventeenth-century millenarianism and proto-feminist resistance to rationalism and empiricism.