Carol Houlihan Flynn

Education
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley,  English, 1974
M.A., Brown University, American Civilization, 1969
B.A., University of Illinois, Urbana, English, 1967

Biography
I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. I received a BA in English from the University of Illinois, an MA in American Civilization from Brown University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. After spending four years in London, where I wrote a novel (unpublished) and my book on Richardson, I moved back to the states and began teaching at New York University. After getting tenure at NYU, I moved in 1985 to Boston and Tufts, where I am now Professor of English. At Tufts, I have been Graduate Director, Director of American Studies, Director of the Somerville Conversations, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and a member of way too many committees. I write academic books and novels (one actually published), like to cook and eat, love dogs, go to the opera, climb hills and hike, particularly in Scotland, where my husband and I have a little cottage on a tidal river that runs into the Solway Firth. My husband and I each have kids, all in their thirties, and grandchildren, seven girls and one boy. They live nearby, so now one of the best things we do is take walks and sometimes run around Jamaica Pond and the Arboretum with them. I live in Jamaica Plain with my husband, David Tarbet.

Research Interests
London in the 18th century. I am presently writing a book called "Learning London: How Outsiders become Urban in the Eighteenth Century," that explores the various ways that people came to London from the country, from other countries (Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Africa, and America) and set out to become "Londonized." To become urban was literally to become nationalized as well, since "London" was the metropolitan center of Britain and Europe. I consult guides, maps, journals, novels and letters in an attempt to locate physically, intellectually and emotionally urban subjects and their progress through the town. I am particularly interested in the social spaces that construct gender, sexuality, class, and racial differences.

I am also interested in working on the 1790's, a time of revolution and counter-revolution in Europe, the Americas, and England. I am particularly interested in Blake, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, also in the Irish Revolution of 1798.

I have finished “The Animals,” a memoir that looks at the way animals have shaped and reflected my family’s character. It is comical and tragic. I am writing a novel, “The Basement Holds up the House,” a gothic study of family relationships.

Courses Taught

• "The Age of Unreason"
• "Reason and Revolt"
• "A Decade of Revolution"
• "Narrative and American Identity" (a course on immigration narratives that involves service learning in the communities of Somerville and Medford)
• "Burney and Austen"
• "Mapping London
• "Girls' Books"
• "Romance without Finance is a Nuisance"
• "The Sentimental Moment"
• "Writing Lives"

Publication Highlights

• Books
• “Whatever Happened to the Gordon Riots?" Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula Backsheider and Catherine Ingrassia, Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
• Clarissa and Her Readers: New Essays for the Clarisa Project, edited and introduced by Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland, AMS Press, 1999.
• The Body in Swift and Defoe, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters, Princeton University Press, 1982.
• Washed in the Blood, a novel, Seaview/Putnam Press, 1983.
• Articles
• "Running out of Matter: The Body Exercised in Eighteenth-Century Fiction," The Languages of the Psyches, ed., G. Rousseau, University of California Press, 1990
• "Closing Down Masterpiece Theater," Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation, 1996. Reprinted in Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by David H. Richter, Texas Tech University Press, 1999.
• "Jane Austen's Letters," The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed, Edward Copeland and Juliet MacMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• "Where the Wild Things Are: Guides to Eighteenth-Century London," Eighteenth-Century Heresies, ed. Pat Rogers, Bucknell University Press, 2002.

Links

• http://NILS.LIB.tufts.edu. This is the link to the Bolles collection of 18th and 19th century materials, maps, guides, books, about London.

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