Rachel Elin Nolan

Dr Rachel Elin Nolan

Lecturer in American Literature

My profile

Interests and expertise

I joined Manchester Metropolitan University as a Lecturer in American Literature in 2021. Before that, I taught at the University of Manchester, Pennsylvania State University, and North Dakota State University.

My research and teaching interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, women’s writing, and the history of feminist thought.

My scholarship has appeared in Signs, Legacy, and Journal of American Studies, among other journals, and I am  the editor of the Broadview critical edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1898 feminist treatise Women and Economics. 

Right now, I’m at work on my first book project, Professions of Intimacy: Work, Reproduction and the Professional Woman in the Progressive-Era United States, which examines the practices and possibilities of women’s professional activities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. 

Get in touch

2:02 Bellhouse
By appointment

Research outputs

Monograph (in preparation)

  • “Professions of Intimacy: Work, Reproduction, and the Professional Woman in the Progressive Era United States” 

Critical Edition

  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics and Other Writings (Broadview Press, 2022)

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles 

  • “Uplift, Radicalism, and Performance: Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.35.1 (2018) 1-24.
  • “‘A Cool and Deliberate Sort of Madness’: Production, Reproduction, and the Provisional Recovery of Progressive-Era Women’s Narratives.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 43.2 (2018) 353-377. [Recipient of the 2018 Modern Language Association (MLA) Essay Prize: Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship].
  • “‘It Was More Than I Could Bear’: Recovering the Extrapolitical in Susanna Haswell Rowson’s Charlotte Temple.” Literature in the Early American Republic. 8 (2018) 25 pages.
  • “‘tween aleph and beta I’: Crossing Lines of Difference with M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!” Caribbean Quarterly.56. (2015) 20-39.

Book Chapters

  • “Chapter 11: Progressive Chicago: Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, and Social Reform Literature,” in A History of Chicago Literature, ed. Frederik Byrn Køhlert. Cambridge University Press, 2021. [Invited submission]

Review Essays, Book Reviews, Encyclopedia Articles

  • The End of Bare Life? Review of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, by Sarah Jane Cervenak; New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon; Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, by Alexander G Weheliye. Journal of American Studies. 51.3 (2017) E33.
  • Review of Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures Amid the Debris of Legal Personhood, by Angela Naimou. Journal of American Studies. 50.4. (2016) E65.
  • “LGBT activism, Caribbean.” The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Ed. Nancy Naples. Vol. IV, 1546-1550. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.

Press and media

Interview. “The 1908 Murder That Brought Sexual Assault, Work, and Power to the Headlines,” by Lindsay Bernhagen. Slate Magazine. December 2017.