Date/Time
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
12:00 pm PDT – 1:00 pm PDT
Presented by Erin Severson, Ph.D. Student, University of California, Los Angeles
Hosted by the Early Modern Research Group
Online event via Zoom
To register, please visit: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/iISb0vh0TDiwV7SWDigUWQ
The praxis of transatlantic book history is contingent on one’s ability to conduct extensive research on the material conditions of the trade in both books and bodies—which were treated as interchangeable commodities in the eyes of racial capitalism. Transatlantic book history is a method of inquiry which interrogates national borders while also enabling us to reckon with the material and cultural relationship between literary production and human capital. When it comes to an investigation of black humor through the lens of material culture, we are dealing with stringently policed geographical and ideological borders. As Sean D. Moore points out in Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 (2019), London functioned as the capital of eighteenth-century America. Likewise, thinking in terms of what Joseph Rezek terms the “print Atlantic” unsettles national borders, which are often reinforced because of the political value of distancing Britain from the violence of American plantation slavery.
This research forms part of Erin’s dissertation project, which constructs a history of black humor through the lens of transatlantic book history. Black humor, as a reference both to a comical disposition and a condition of embodied, even pathologized identity (via humoral medicine and melancholy), can be traced through both African diasporic Blackness and the historical process of “blackening” the Irish (England’s first and most proximate colonial project). Other chapters will deal with canonical writers Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, as well as the lesser-known Ignatius Sancho, who is primarily remembered as the first Black Briton to vote. The chapter on Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth and the complicated editorial history of her novel Belinda brings questions of Irishness, Creole identity, and black humor in conversation with gender. Writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, Maria Edgeworth intervenes in the acculturation of blackness and its rapidly shifting valuation through what may be understood as a proto-feminist lens. She engages issues of blackness or black humor—defined as that which not only implicates “blackness” but also carries a tinge of morbidity—from the unique perspective of an Irish woman writing to a transatlantic audience. Attempting to grapple with the treatment of blackness in Belinda, which tends to manifest primarily in a comical register (though never devoid of the persistent threat if not explicit act of violence), this paper crafts a working definition of black humor to accommodate the ways in which racialized discourse intersects with issues of gender.
Erin Severson earned her master’s degree from the University of Oxford, which she attended as an Ertegun Scholar for the Humanities in 2020–2021. Her research interests center around eighteenth-century satire, early modern Atlantic medicine, and the history of the book. At Oxford and UCLA, she organized conferences with an emphasis on archival methods and the material culture of the early modern period. Immersed in the world of rare books, she has worked in special collections libraries, on behalf of booksellers, catalogers, and private collectors in a variety of roles, always pushing for accessibility in some of the academy’s most elite spaces. Her dissertation brings together the satiric bite of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the sentimental ironies of Sterne, and the palliative humor of Ignatius Sancho in an investigation of comic violence from the perspective of transatlantic book history.
Image: Title Page, Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s copy of Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, Vol. I, Bodleian Library, Arch. H e.190