Alessa Johns

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
M.A., McGill University
B.A., Stanford University

Alessa Johns's work focuses on the long eighteenth century; her interests include British literature and culture, European women writers, Utopian literature and theory, Travel, the study of Disasters, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Jameson, and Anglo-German cultural exchange. She served for six years as book reviews editor for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Publications

Books:                                                            

• Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750-1837 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014) https://www.press.umich.edu/6536705/bluestocking_feminism_and_british_ge...
• Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/54qdn3df9780252028410.html
• Editor and Introduction, Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment (New York and London: Routledge, 1999) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781136683893
• Editor and Introduction, Reflections on Sentiment: Essays in Honor of George Starr (University of Delaware Press, 2016) https://library.udel.edu/udpress/titles/reflections/
• Co-editor with Katrin Berndt, Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (De Gruyter, 2022) https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/552534?rskey=bMYaO2&result=1

Selected Articles:

• "Austen's Persuasion," forthcoming in Persuasion After Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Period, ed. Yasmin Solomonescu and Stefan Uhlig (Oxford University Press 2024)
• " 'Dreadful Visitations': Witnessing Disasters," in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture 1660-1700  Volume 45 Number 2 (Fall 2021): 9-14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/849025
• "'The Tranquil March of the Revolution': German and German-American Reverberations of Mary Wollstonecraft's Writings," in Reverberations of Revolution, ed. Elizabeth Amann and Michael Boyden (Edinburgh University Press 2021), pp. 36-55. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-reverberations-of-revolution.html
• "Anna Jameson," in Handbook of British Travel Writing, ed. Barbara Schaff (De Gruyter 2020), pp. 357-371. https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/523262
• "Translations," in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, ed. Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen (Cambridge University Press 2020), pp. 323-331. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108261067
• "Striving Sisters: Wilhelmine of Bayreuth and Philippine Charlotte of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel," in Markgräfin Wilhelmine von Bayreuth und die Erlanger Universität: Künste und Wissenschaften im Dialog, ed. Christina Strunck (Michael Imhof Verlag 2019), pp. 216-229. https://www.imhofverlag.de/buecher/markgraefin-wilhelmine-von-bayreuth/
• "German Women's Writing in British Magazines, 1760-1820," in Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell (Edinburgh University Press 2018), pp. 190-204. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-women-s-periodicals-and-print-...
• "Bluestocking Studies 2011-2017: The Transnational Turn," Literature Compass 14.11 (Nov 2017) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12426/abstract
• "Jane Austen the Stoic: Channeling Elizabeth Carter and the Bluestocking Ethos," in Women's Writing 21.4 (Oct 2014) http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/byUdTt5CIFHiqhyfPsKA/full
• "Anna Jameson in Germany: 'A.W.' and Women's Translation," in Translation and Literature 19 (2010) https://www.jstor.org/stable/20789110?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
• "Feminism and Utopianism," in the Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge University Press 2010)  https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886659.008
• "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Enlightenment Utopianism for 21st-Century Feminists?" in Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Nicole Pohl and Brenda Tooley (Ashgate 2007) https://books.google.de/books?id=TvEFDAAAQBAJ&pg=PR5&lpg=PR5&dq=Thinking...
• "The Book as Cosmopolitan Object: Women's Publishing, Collecting, and Anglo-German Exchange," in Women and Material Culture, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (Palgrave Macmillan 2007) https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780230007055

Awards and Honors

• Short-Term Residential Research Fellowship, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, February-March 2022
• Short-Term Residential Research Fellowship, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, January-February 2019
• Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Davis, 2016
• Phi Beta Kappa of Northern California, Excellence in Teaching Award, 2016 (student-nominated award)
• Associated Students of the University of California, Davis, Excellence in Teaching Award (winner for the Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies), 2012 (student-nominated award)
• Lichtenberg-Kolleg Residential Research Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany, 2011-2012
• UC President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 2008-2009
• Research Fellowship, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, 2003
• Faculty Development Award, University of California, Davis, 1999
• Fulbright Foundation Research Fellowship; affiliation with the Graduiertenkolleg "Geschlechterdifferenz und Literatur," Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich, Germany, 1997
• Catherine Macaulay Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, for the best graduate student essay on a women's studies subject, 1993
• Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, University of California, Berkeley, 1993
• Soroptimist Founder Region Dissertation Fellowship, 1991-1992
• Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 1983-1987
• Phi Beta Kappa, 1981

Email:  amjohns@ucdavis.edu