English

Hilary Havens

Hilary Havens

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ADDRESS
408 McClung Tower

Hilary Havens

Lindsay Young Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Program

18th Century, Romantic Period, Digital Humanities, the Novel

Hilary Havens’s book, Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print, was published in 2019 with Cambridge University Press. In it, she recovers and analyzes material from novel manuscripts and post-publication revisions to identify a form of “networked authorship.” By tracing authors’ revisions to their novels, the influence of familial and literary circles, reviewers, and authors’ own previous writings can be discerned. The book focuses on the work of Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth to challenge the individualistic view of authorship that arose during the Romantic period, and it argues that networked authorship shaped the composition of eighteenth-century novels.

With Susan Egenolf, Meredith Hale, Jessica Richard, and Robin Runia, Hilary Havens is one of the editors of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (https://melp.dh.tamu.edu/), an NEH-funded digital edition of the correspondence of Maria Edgeworth. Members of the public have contributed to this project by transcribing Edgeworth’s letters through the Zooniverse platform. She is also the editor of Didactic Novels and British Women’s Writing, 1790-1820 (Routledge, 2017), and she is the co-editor of the correspondence of Samuel Richardson and Edward Young, which is forthcoming in volume 8 of the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Dr. Havens is under contract with Cambridge University Press to produce two editions of Frances Burney’s Cecilia, an academic edition and a student edition.

Education

  • PhD McGill University
  • MSt University of Oxford
  • BA Harvard University

Specialties

18th Century, Romantic Period, Digital Humanities, the Novel

Grants

Selected National Grants

  • National Endowment for the Humanities: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant, co-principal investigator with Susan Egenolf, Jessica Richard, and Robin Runia (2025-28)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundation Grant, co-principal investigator with Jessica Richard, Susan Egenolf, and Robin Runia (2022-24)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities: Humanities Connections Planning Grant, co-director with Amy Elias and Amir Sadovnik (2021-22)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, “Building Capable Communities for Crowdsourced Transcription” (2021-22)

Publications

Selected Publications

  • Maria Edgeworth Letters Project, co-general editor with Susan Egenolf, Meredith Hale, Jessica Richard, and Robin Runia, in progress digital edition of Maria Edgeworth’s complete correspondence. https://mariaedgeworth.org/. 
  • “Maria Edgeworth’s Fictional Fragments and Unreliable Narrators,” Studies in Romanticism 64.2 (2025), forthcoming. 
  • “Communities of Collaboration: Building the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project,” co-authored with Susan Egenolf, Jessica Richard, and Robin Runia, in “Romanticism and the Digital Humanities,” ed. Jennifer Reed, special issue, Studies in Romanticism 63.3 (2024): 335-68. 
  • “From Archive to Database: Using Crowdsourcing, TEI, and Collaborative Labor to Construct the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project,” co-authored with Eliza Alexander Wilcox, Meredith Hale, and Jamie Kramer, Digital Humanities Quarterly 18.2 (2024), https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/18/2/000424/000424.html.
  • “Samuel Richardson and Edward Young’s Authorship Network,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 56.4 (2023): 601-18. Honorable mention for the 2024 Percy G. Adams Prize from the Southeastern Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies.
  • “Digital Defoe,” in Daniel Defoe in Context, ed. George Justice and Albert J. Rivero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 137-44.
  • “‘How is our Blue club cut up!’: Frances Burney’s Changing Views of the Bluestockings,” Eighteenth-Century Life 46.1 (2022): 37-55.
  • “William Godwin’s Correspondence on Proof Corrections to St. Leon,” Notes and Queries 67.4 (2020): 517-19, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjaa148. 
  • “Memorializing Sorrow in Frances Burney’s ‘Consolatory Extracts,’” Eighteenth-Century Life 43.3 (2019): 23-40.
  • Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Monograph.
  • “Manuscript Studies and the Eighteenth Century,” Literature Compass 16.7 (2019), e12537. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12537.

Links to postprint and open-access versions of some of my research can be found here: https://trace.tennessee.edu/.