April Alliston works mainly at the intersections of the fields of eighteenth-century studies, gender studies, and the history and theory of the novel. She is also serving currently as Director of Graduate Studies.
Published books and current projects 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 biography of James Fenimore Cooper, co-authored with Pamela J. Schirmeister of Yale University.
Another ongoing study explores 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 around female fidelity.
Support for her research has included fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as, most recently, an Old Dominion Professorship in the Princeton University Council of the Humanities. April Alliston regularly teaches courses on the theory and history of narrative and the novel, on the Gothic mode in literature and culture, on gender and genre, and on eighteenth-century British and European literature.
