April Alliston
April Alliston is Professor of Comparative Literature and is currently on sabbatical as Old Dominion Professor in the Princeton University Council of the Humanities. As Old Dominion Professor, she is working on a book exploring the relationship between European gender conventions and the origins of the modern novel, arguing that the early novel, far from affirming Enlightenment individualism, connects new philosophical skepticism about interiority and sense experience with archaic social anxieties about female fidelity. In support of this and other research, she has been the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other national awards. Past books include Virtue's Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women's Fiction, The Longman Anthology of World Literature (Vol. D, the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries), a critical edition of Sophia Lee's 1785 novel, The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times, and a forthcoming biography of James Fenimore Cooper. When she returns to teaching in 2009-2010, Professor Alliston will offer a graduate seminar on theories of narrative and the novel, and undergraduate courses on the Gothic mode in literature and culture, on Gender and the Rise of the Novel in Europe and on eighteenth-century literature.
