Dr Rachel Elin Nolan
Senior Lecturer in American Literature
My profile
Interests and expertise
I joined Manchester Metropolitan University as a Lecturer in American Literature in 2021. Before that, I taught at the University of Manchester, Pennsylvania State University, and North Dakota State University.
My research and teaching interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, women’s writing, and the history of feminist thought.
My scholarship has appeared in Signs, Legacy, and Journal of American Studies, among other journals, and I am the editor of the Broadview critical edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1898 feminist treatise Women and Economics.
Right now, I’m at work on my first book project, Professions of Intimacy: Work, Reproduction and the Professional Woman in the Progressive-Era United States, which examines the practices and possibilities of women’s professional activities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
Research outputs
Monograph (in preparation)
- “Professions of Intimacy: Work, Reproduction, and the Professional Woman in the Progressive Era United States”
Critical Edition
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics and Other Writings (Broadview Press, 2022)
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
- “Uplift, Radicalism, and Performance: Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.35.1 (2018) 1-24.
- “‘A Cool and Deliberate Sort of Madness’: Production, Reproduction, and the Provisional Recovery of Progressive-Era Women’s Narratives.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 43.2 (2018) 353-377. [Recipient of the 2018 Modern Language Association (MLA) Essay Prize: Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship].
- “‘It Was More Than I Could Bear’: Recovering the Extrapolitical in Susanna Haswell Rowson’s Charlotte Temple.” Literature in the Early American Republic. 8 (2018) 25 pages.
- “‘tween aleph and beta I’: Crossing Lines of Difference with M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!” Caribbean Quarterly.56. (2015) 20-39.
Book Chapters
- “Chapter 11: Progressive Chicago: Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, and Social Reform Literature,” in A History of Chicago Literature, ed. Frederik Byrn Køhlert. Cambridge University Press, 2021. [Invited submission]
Review Essays, Book Reviews, Encyclopedia Articles
- The End of Bare Life? Review of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, by Sarah Jane Cervenak; New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon; Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, by Alexander G Weheliye. Journal of American Studies. 51.3 (2017) E33.
- Review of Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures Amid the Debris of Legal Personhood, by Angela Naimou. Journal of American Studies. 50.4. (2016) E65.
- “LGBT activism, Caribbean.” The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Ed. Nancy Naples. Vol. IV, 1546-1550. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.
- Books (authored/edited/special issues)
Books (authored/edited/special issues)
Nolan, R. (2023) Women and Economics and Other Writing / Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Broadview Press.
- Chapters in books
Chapters in books
Nolan, R. (2021) 'Progressive Chicago : Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, and social reform literature.' In Køhlert, F.B. (ed.) Chicago: A Literary History. Cambridge University Press, pp. 153-166.
- Journal articles
Journal articles
Nolan, R. (2023) 'Virginia Penny's economic horizons: fact and futurity in nineteenth century women's encyclopedic writing.' J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists, 11(2) pp. 385-410.
Rachel Nolan, (2018) 'Uplift, Radicalism, and Performance: Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School.' Legacy, 35(1) pp. 1-1.
Nolan, R.E. (2018) '“A Cool and Deliberate Sort of Madness”: Production, Reproduction, and the Provisional Recovery of Progressive-Era Women’s Narratives.' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 43(2) pp. 353-377.
Nolan, R. (2015) '“Tween aleph and beta i”: Crossing lines of difference with M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!.' Caribbean Quarterly, 61(4) pp. 20-39.
Press and media
Interview. “The 1908 Murder That Brought Sexual Assault, Work, and Power to the Headlines,” by Lindsay Bernhagen. Slate Magazine. December 2017.