Dr Leslie Ritchie

PhD McMaster


Chair, Graduate Studies (until December 2013)


Contact Information

Office: Watson 427
Office Hours:
Extension: 74429
E-mail: ritchiel@queensu.ca

To contact regarding Graduate Program questions:

Graduate Studies Office
Office: Watson 410
Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30–2:30 (appointments advisable)
Extension: 74410
E-mail: gradengl@queensu.ca

Research Interests

English literature of the long eighteenth century (particularly that pertaining to popular culture and the performing arts), interdisciplinarity, pedagogy, Canadian poetry.

Recent Publications

  • “The Spouters’ Revenge: Apprentice Actors and the Imitation of London’s Theatrical Celebrities,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation 53.1 (Winter 2012):  41-71.
  • “Teaching with Norton’s Digital Resources,” Teaching With the Norton Anthology of English Literature: A Guide For Instructors (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012): 43–61.
  • “Performing Literary History: Playing with Seventeenth-Century Dramatic Types,” co-author Judith W. Fisher, Pedagogy 11.3 (Fall 2011): 493-515.
  • Norton Anthology of English Literature Visual Library Instructor CD-ROM (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
  • Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England: Social Harmony in Literature and Performance, 1740–1800 (Ashgate, 2008).
  • “Garrick’s Male-Coquette and Theatrical Masculinities,” Refiguring the Coquette, ed. Shelley King and Yaël Schlick (Bucknell UP, 2008).
  • Before & After, dir. Judith W. Fisher, performed at the Vogt Theatre, Kingston, Jan. 30–31, 2008.

Remarks

Leslie Ritchie is author of Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England: Social Harmony in Literature and Performance, 1740–1800 (Ashgate, 2008), and editor of Duncan Campbell Scott: Addresses, Essays and Reviews (Canadian Poetry Press, 2000), which has been digitally republished. Ritchie has written articles for such journals as The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation, Pedagogy, and Eighteenth-Century Life, and in books including the New Dictionary of National Biography, the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (Toronto, 2002), and Reading Early Modern Women (Routledge, 2004). Ritchie is the editor of “Travel, Trade, and the Expansion of Empire,” a series of online readings, critical introductions, and study questions created for Norton Topics Online (2003). Most recently, she created the Norton Anthology of English Literature Instructor CD-ROM, a collection of images designed to complement readings found in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and recently contributed to the volume Teaching with the Norton Anthology of English Literature: A Guide for Instructors. She is an Advisory Editor for the journal Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research.

I welcome new graduate students with exciting proposals for studies in the long eighteenth century (1660–1820), and am particularly keen to work with students who have an interest in music, art and literature interdisciplinarity; performance theory and practice; Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and poetry; or historical ephemera, including newspapers and pamphlets. My current research concerns David Garrick and the mediation of celebrity. I have also served as reader on a number of theses concerning Canadian literature, and especially enjoy working with students on projects that combine these areas of interest—late eighteenth-century Canadian exploration literature, for example, which was the subject of one recently-completed PhD thesis. I have employed graduate and undergraduate students as research assistants, and thanks to generous research support from SSHRCC, I have sponsored several graduate students’ participation in the annual conference of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, as well as in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.