Professor
She/her/hers
Office Information:
3275 Angell Hall
hours: Wednesday 2-3pm and by appointment
Graduate Faculty; Twentieth Century American; Ecocriticism; American; Visual Culture; Colonial and Early American; Science and Literature; Travel; Caribbean; Drama and Performance; English; Transatlantic; African American
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Stanford 1998, MA U.C. Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric, 1990, BA Princeton 1986Current Courses
ENGLISH 298-003
Introduction to Literary Studies
Highlighted Work and Publications

American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World
Susan Scott Parrish
Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late 16th century through the 18th. Rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, scientific knowledge about America emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic. Parrish finds that Anglo-American nonelites, women, Indians, and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to... See More
The History and Present State of Virginia: A New Edition with an Introduction by Susan Scott Parrish
By Robert Beverly (Edited by Susan Scott Parrish)
While in London in 1705, Robert Beverley wrote and published The History and Present State of Virginia, one of the earliest printed English-language histories about North America by an author born there. Like his brother-in-law William Byrd II, Beverley was a scion of Virginia's planter elite, personally ambitious and at odds with royal governors in the colony. As a native-born American--most famously claiming "I am an Indian"--he provided English readers with the first thoroughgoing account of the province's past, natural history, Indians, and current politics and...
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