Charlotte Hand

Thesis Title

Recalibrating Modern Womanhood: Time, Region, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America

Supervisor

Dr. Nicholas Gaskill

Research Interest

Nineteenth-century American literature, history of the book, gender and sexuality in the US, regional literature in antebellum America, temporal politics, and feminism. 

Doctoral Research

Through a regional and temporal approach, my thesis explores temporal reinventions of the idealized image of feminity in nineteenth-century America, the True Woman, shedding light on a nexus of competing discourses on modern American womanhood in the nineteenth century. My project utilizes feminist criticism on chronobiopolitics to analyze distinct regional reconceptions/ modernization of women's time in the work of authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Kirkland, John Ballou, Caroline Lee Hentz, and popular periodicals such as Godey's Lady's Book and Southern Ladies' Book.