Melba V. Hughes Distinguished Professor of English Mary A. Waters teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, women writers, and genre classes in poetry, fiction, literary theory, and digital humanities. She received her PhD at University of California, Davis, and before arriving at Wichita State taught at Holy Names College, UC Davis, Temple University, and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Dr. Waters's research focuses on the contributions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women literary critics to aesthetic debates that shaped British Romanticism. It draws on fields such as print culture and periodical studies, the emergence of British national consciousness, and the rise of literary professionalism. Her book, British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004 as part of their series Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Her edition, British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of their Literary Criticism (2009), also appeared with Palgrave Macmillan. Articles and chapters by Dr. Waters have appeared in such academic journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Prose, and in books from Ashgate and Cambridge University Press. She has an ongoing project developing The Criticism Archive, a digital repository of literary criticism by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers that, as part of The Poetess Archive, is federated with and reviewed by Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship ().
Contact Dr. Waters at mary.waters@wichita.edu