Pam Perkins

• ENGL 1340 - Introduction to Literary Analysis
• ENGL 2190 - The Arctic in 19th-Century British Literature
• ENGL 3800 - The Gothic
• ENGL 3940 - Travelling the 18th Century
• ENGL 4630/7710 - Supernatural Fictions in the 19th and 20th Centuries 

I came to the University of Manitoba after completing my doctorate at Dalhousie University and then going on to a SSHRC-funded postdoc in Cambridge, where I worked on the radical fiction of the 1790s. Over my years at the University of Manitoba, I have developed a strong interest in scholarly editing and have published editions of five novels or novellas as well as four travel journals. My teaching interests range from general surveys of the literature of the long eighteenth century to more focused courses on individual authors (Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson) or to special topics such as ghost stories, the Arctic, or 18th- and 19th-century media cultures.

• PhD (English), Dalhousie University, 1991
• MA (English), Dalhousie University, 1987
• BA Honours (English), University of Utah, 1986

Research interests

• 18th-century / Romantic-era women's writing
• 18th- and 19th-century Scottish writing
• 18th- and 19th-century travel writing
• The North in literature
• Women's book history

Research summary

My current research focuses on two main areas. First, I am working on a long-term project on travel around the North Atlantic rim — from Orkney and Shetland through Iceland to Newfoundland — during the last decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th. To date, this has resulted in several published articles and a selection of the late 1820s journals of Newfoundland governor Sir Thomas Cochrane, edited from manuscript. The second strand focuses on early 19th-century Scottish women travellers; output to date includes an co-edited collection of two travelogues as well as a number of articles and conference papers. 

Research affiliations/groups

• Board member, Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society 

Monograph 

• Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment. Rodopi Press: Amsterdam and New York City, 2010

Selected Editions

• Margaret Oliphant, Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond, for The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2018).
• Women’s Travel Writing in Scotland, eds. Pam Perkins and Kirsteen McCue. 4 vols., London: Routledge, 2016. 
• Thomas Cochrane, selected Journals, 1825-27, Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 29: 1 (Spring, 2014), 117-168.

Selected recent and forthcoming articles and chapters

• Perkins, Pam. “Anne Grant and Literary Networks of Jacobitism,” in Networking Jacobites, 1688 to the Present, eds. Leith Davis and Kevin James. Edinburgh University Press (5800 words; contract accepted and signed)
• Perkins, Pam. “Patriotic Travellers: The Waldie Sisters in Italy,” in D’Écosse, de France et d’ailleurs: pour une histoire transnationale des communautés étrangères dans l’Italie du XVIIIe siècle, eds. Marion Amblard and Gilles Montègre. (8000 words, in press; publication expected July 2024).
• “‘Such Classic Ground’: Women and the Romantic-Era Scottish Tour” in Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours eds. James Watt and Alison O’Byrne Cambridge University Press (preparing to go to press)
• “North America” in The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Prose, ed. Robert Morrison. Oxford University Press (in press.)
• “The Novel: Romance and History, Scott, Porter, Galt, and Hogg.” The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature, eds. Sheila M. Kidd, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, and Kenneth McNeil. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2022, 26-32. 
• “Eliza Fletcher’s Private Authorship,” in The Huntington Library Quarterly 84: 1 (2021), 65-73. 
• “‘The Fair Daughters of Terra Nova’: Women in the Settler Cultures of Early Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland” in Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women Travellers, ed. Misty Kruger (Bucknell University Press 2021), 81-94.
• “‘Enlightened Strangers’: Charlotte Waldie Eaton and Late Enlightenment Educational Travel” in Aufklarüng / Enlightenment 32 (2020), 291-310 (Special issue on the feminist Enlightenment in Europe, eds. Isabel Karremann and Gideon Stiening)
• “Reviewing Femininity: Gender and Genre in the Early 19th-Century Periodical Press.” Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690s-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, eds Jennie Batchelor and Manushug Powell. Edinburgh UP, 2018), 250-62.