Megan Matchinske

My first book, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject, was published in 1998 with Cambridge University Press in Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, volume 26. A second book project, growing out of my interest in history and historical trajectory, came out in 2009, also with Cambridge. Women Writing History in Early Modern England considers what it means for early modern women writers and postmodern women critics to engage history as a strategy, to make the past mean something. In this study, I argue that historical narrative becomes for us a way to investigate how human action functions in time, how the various pasts that we know impel us to be responsible citizens. Historical writers need history not because it corrects misconceptions or proclaims truths; rather, history tests our ability to endow lived processes with significance, to turn material events into ethical opportunities. My current research involves an edition (part of the Other Voice series) that focuses on the Mary Carleton bigamy trials and a book project that examines moments of rupture in historical memory—interruptions to and failures in political, religious, economic or cultural transfer in early modern culture. In the scholarly investigation that I am describing here I want to think about how early modernity deals with historical loss and how women in particular accept or deny erasures of the past. Informed by the work of Paul Ricoeur—this study explores the relationship between forgiving and forgetting as both are epistemologically constructed within and across domains in seventeenth-century England.

Recent Work Includes:

“History’s ‘Silent Whispers’: Representing the Past Through Feeling and Form,” in Attending to Early Modern Women: Conflict, Concord, ed. Jane Donawerth, et al., Delaware: Associated University Presses, in press.

“Channeling the Gender Debate: Legitimation and Agency in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Poetry,” in The History of British Women’s Writing, ed. Mihoko Suzuki, vol. 2, Houndsmill: Palgrave, in press.

"Serial Identity: History, Gender and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford,” reprinted in Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson, ed. Mihoko Suzuki, Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700, vol. 5, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. 2009, 202-18

Hire Date: 1993
Ph. D., University of California, San Diego, 1993
M.A., University of California, San Diego, 1990
A.B., Duke University, 1979
matchin@email.unc.edu
(919) 962-4058

Curriculum Vitae