Rebecca Soares earned her bachelor's degree in English, with honors and high distinction, from the University of Michigan, and her master's and doctorate in literary studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she taught a variety of discussion sections ranging in subject from upper level surveys of British and American literature to special topics such as "Interracial Literature" and "Literature, Gender and Sexuality." She also taught four first-year composition courses under the themes "Language and Performance," "Performance, Spectacle and Identity," and "Life Writing and Writing Life: Identity Politics and Representations of Difference." For her work as a teaching assistant, she was awarded the 2013 Capstone Ph.D. Teaching Award by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her ongoing research interests range across the 19th century and across the Atlantic. Through her research in spiritualism, Professor Soares has become interested in the various nervous states that either inspire or impede artistic and literary production. For her next project, she intends to explore the ways in which anxiety and depression are not only depicted in literature but also how these mental and physical states are often the result of or impetus for writing. She is also interested in whether anxiety can be a productive emotion for both the writer and the reader. Her other interests include: 19th-century British and American literature, transatlantic and global literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, book history, and print culture.
Education
Ph.D. Literary Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.A. Literary Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.A. English (Honors and High Distinction), University of Michigan
Research Interests
Dr. Soares' current project, “Immaterial Print: Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Literature,” argues that the nineteenth-century popular practice of spiritualism provides a metaphor for transatlantic communication and literary circulation. Her article, “Literary Graftings: Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reader,” won the 2010 VanArsdel Prize given by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and was published in Victorian Periodicals Review. Her scholarship has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Women’s Writing, English Literature, and Religion and the Arts. She is co-editor of The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s (Routledge, 2019).
