Dr Rebecca Ferguson BA (Southampton), PhD (London)
Contact Details
School of Cultural StudiesTel: 01570 424857 (4857)
E-mail: r.ferguson@trinitysaintdavid.ac.uk
Campus
Lampeter CampusJob Title
Lecturer in English LiteratureRole in the University
Rebecca Ferguson is Lecturer in English Literature and has teaching and research interests in the fields of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, areas of American literature (notably African American literature), and theories of verbal/visual representation. At undergraduate level, she currently teaches 'Ways of Reading: Representation and Subjectivity', areas of research methods and study skills, and a module on Literary Research which directs students towards independent analysis of materials relating to the literature and culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Past undergraduate modules have included 'Marvell to Pope', 'Black Women Writers of the USA', 'The American Short Story', 'Twentieth-Century American Literature', 'Nineteenth-Century American Narrative', 'Modern Drama' and 'Contemporary Drama'.
Within the taught postgraduate programmes, she teaches areas of the MA Research Methods and Skills and Comparative Critical Approaches modules; she has also supervised a number of candidates for research degrees, including successful MPhil and PhD candidates.
Background
Rebecca Ferguson’s research and publications have covered the fields of eighteenth-century satire, the interrelations of the visual and the verbal, and the works of Toni Morrison. She is the author of a book on Alexander Pope and the context of eighteenth-century writings concerning the role and interpretation of the ‘passions’ (motivational impulses) entitled Th’Unbalanc’d Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion (Brighton: HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1986), described by David Nokes in the TLS as ‘careful in analysis, modest in pretensions, subtle, useful and intelligent’; one chapter of this study, on Pope’s Essay on Man, was reprinted by Pearson Education in the anthology Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 (2002). She also co-authored a guide to Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (Akadimias, 1986); further articles have been published on relations of body and text in Pope’s poetry Pope: New Contexts, ed. by David Fairer (HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1990) and on objectification and the ‘shifting signifier’ in The Rape of the Lock (Critical Survey, 1992). Following a year as a Fulbright Exchange Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (1988-89), she became particularly interested in the works of the black American novelist Toni Morrison, and published an article on ‘History, Memory and Language in Beloved’ which first appeared in Feminist Criticism and Practice, ed. by Susan Sellers (1991), and has been reprinted in Lois Parkinson Zamora’s anthology Contemporary American Women Writers in the Longman Critical Readers series (1998). She has published other articles on Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1993) and Paradise (2007), and her full-length study Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison(2007) has been published by Peter Lang within the series New Comparative Poetics. This study explores Morrison’s articulation of changing aspects of black American identity, assessing among other concerns her poetic practice in relation to voice, time, vision, space and memory, her deployment of narrative and generic forms, and her expressive use of intertextual references. It also highlights as a central concern the stages of historical and cultural transition which feature most prominently within the eight novels that Morrison has published to date. The book received a Recognition Award from the Toni Morrison Society in America in July, 2008.
The focus of the critical works above has been particularly on the historical and cultural contexts within which literary texts may be interpreted; these interests have extended also to contemporary critical theoretical frameworks, including specific areas of psychoanalysis (notably object relations theory) and aspects of feminist and poststructuralist theory. As programme director for the Department’s long-running MA on ‘The Word and the Visual Imagination,’ Rebecca Ferguson also has a broad interest in word/image relations, and has given conference papers on subjects relating to this field (‘The Performative Utterance in Eighteenth-Century Painting’ (Zurich, 1990), ‘The Ekphrastic Portrait’ (Lund, 1995). She has given further conference papers and guest lectures in the Netherlands (Amsterdam and Groningen), in Sweden and the USA, and at a range of universities in the UK.
Further projects will include a shorter study of Toni Morrison for the British Council series Writers and Their Work, and an investigation of the figure of Death in the poetry of Swift.
Member of
- British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Toni Morrison Society
- MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States)
Publications
Recent Publications
Authored Book:
Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Brussels, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, 2007), 321 pp. (details on website).
Refereed Articles in Academic Journals:
‘The Controlling Story: Oral and Written Culture in Toni Morrison’s Paradise’, The International Journal of the Humanities, 3 (2007), 151-8.
‘Of Snakes and Men: Toni and Slade Morrison and Pascal LeMaître’s Adaptations of Aesop in Who’s Got Game?’, MELUS 36.2 (2011), 53-70.
Critical Anthology Publication:
‘“Steering Betwixt Extremes”: An Essay on Man,’ in Literature Criticism 1400 to 1800 (Greenhaven: Gale Publishing Group, 2002), pp. 64-94.
Additional Information
Administrative Duties and Experience
Rebecca Ferguson is Director of the MA programme on ‘The Word and the Visual Imagination’. She acts as International Officer for the School of Cultural Studies, and spent a year in Massachusetts, USA as a Fulbright Exchange Lecturer in 1988-89. She acted as Head of Department in the academic session 2006-7. She has also had experience as External Examiner for the BA programmes in English and English and Drama at Loughborough University (1991-94), and as an External Examiner for research degrees at the Universities of Leeds, London and NTNU, Trondheim (Norway).
Grants and Funding Awarded
Rebecca Ferguson has received funding from the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges to participate in the Fulbright Exchange Scheme (1988), a British Academy Overseas Conference Grant (1990) to deliver a paper at the Second International Conference on Word and Image in Zürich, and British Council funding for guest lectures at the Universities of Amsterdam and Groningen (1993). She also received support funding from Gregynog Hall in Powys for a conference on ‘Human Figure and Gesture in Literature and the Visual Arts’ held there in 1994.
