English Department Faculty
Rebekah Mitsein
Associate Professor; Assistant Chair
Rebekah Mitsein
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S485
Telephone: 617-552-9196
Email: mitseinr@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., St. Cloud State University
- M.A., Duquesne University
- Ph.D., Purdue University
Department
Biography
Rebekah Mitsein's research and teaching interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and transatlantic literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on how the era's global crossroads influenced European texts and thought. She is the author of听African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment听(University of Virginia Press), which won the 2022 Walker Cowen Memorial Book Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies and was shortlisted for the 2023 Kenshur Prize for the best book in eighteenth-century studies. She is currently working on two research projects. One,听The True Story of the Abyssinian Liar, is a biography of the traveler James Bruce and the Ethiopian noblewomen who authorized his entr茅e into the eighteenth-century court at Gondar. The other,听Gold Coast Metaphysics and the Matter of Spirit, argues for the influence of African cosmologies on Enlightenment thought.听听听听
Publications
Books
- African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment听(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022).
Articles
- 鈥淎kan Worldviews and the Matter of Evil in Quobna Ottobah Cugoano鈥檚 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species.鈥� Eighteenth-Century Studies 58.4 (2025): 437-457.
- 鈥淭he Eighteenth-Century Novel,鈥� in Realism and the Novel: A Global History, edited by Paul Stasi. Cambridge UP (2025): 15-28.
- 鈥淭he Africa Paradox: Locating Africa in Eighteenth-Century Studies,鈥澨�Literature Compass听21 (2024):听.
- 鈥淒efoe, Africa, and the Levant,鈥� in the听Oxford Handbook to Daniel Defoe听(co-authored with Manushag N. Powell), edited by Alan Downie and Nicholas Seager. Oxford UP (2023): 562-580.
- "Teaching the Eighteenth Century Beyond the Pale."听Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,听vol.听49, 2020, pp. 131-136.
- "Reading Africa in the Contact Zone: Willem Bosman's听New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea."听Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World, edited by Victoria Barnett-Woods, Routledge, 2020, pp. 102-122.
- "."听Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries听10.1 (2018): 1-19.
- 鈥淭rans-Saharan Worlds and Worldviews in Aphra Behn鈥檚听Oroonoko,鈥澨�Eighteenth-Century Fiction听30.3 (2018): 340-368.
- 鈥淭he Crisis of Affective Kinship in Coleridge鈥檚听Christabel,鈥澨�Romanticism听24.1 (2018): 67-77.听听
- 鈥淗umanism and the Ingenious Machine in Richard Ligon's True and Exact History of Barbados.鈥� Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16.1 (2016): 95-122.
- 鈥溾�楥ome and Triumph With Your Don Quixote鈥�: or, How James Bruce Travelled to Discover the Source of the Nile but Found Scotland Instead.鈥� Studies in Travel Writing 18.1 (2014): 1-17.