CHRISTOPHER F. LOAR
Department of English
Western Washington University
Bellingham, WA 98225
Academic positions
Professor. Department of English, Western Washington University, 2022-present.
Associate Professor. Department of English, Western Washington University, 2016-2022.
Assistant Professor. Department of English, Western Washington University, 2013-2016.
Assistant Professor. Department of English, University of California, Davis. August 2007-June 2013.
Lecturer. Department of English, Western Washington University. January-June 2007.
Education
Ph.D. English and American Literature. University of California, Los Angeles
B.A. History, with Honors. University of Chicago.
Publications
Book
Examines allegories of political violence in British fictions of cultural contact, drawing on postcolonial and transatlantic approaches to reconsider developments in British fiction and political writing. Reviewed in Studies in the Novel, Eighteenth-Century Life, Studies in English Literature, Huntington Library Quarterly, and The Year’s Work in English Studies.
Articles and Reviews
Articles
“Plague’s Ecologies: Daniel Defoe and the Epidemic Constitution.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 32.1 (Fall 2019): 31-53.
“Georgic Assemblies: James Grainger, John Dyer, and Bruno Latour.” Philological Quarterly. 97.2 (Spring 2018): 241-261.
“Exclusion and Desecration: Aphra Behn, Liberalism, and the Politics of the Pindaric Ode.” Restoration: 39.1-2 (Spring/Fall 2015): 125-36.
“Soldiers of Feeling: Masculinity and Patriotism in Innes Munro’s Military Memoirs.” Genders. 56 (Fall 2012).
“The Exceptional Eliza Haywood: Women and Extralegality in Eovaai.” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 45.4 (Summer 2012): 565-84.
“How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19.1&2 (Fall 2006): 1-20.
“Nostalgic Correspondence and James Boswell’s Scottish Malady.” Studies in English Literature 44.3 (Summer 2004): 595-615. Reprinted in Lawrence J. Trudeau, ed., Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800: Critical Discussion of the Works of Fifteenth-, Sixteenth-, Seventeenth-, and Eighteenth-Century Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Philosophers, and Other Creative Writers, vol. 182 (Detroit: Gale, 2010).
Book Reviews
Review of Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, ed. Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith. Forthcoming in The Scriblerian.
Review of Jason H. Pearl, Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel. Studies in the Novel 47:2 (Summer 2015): 277-78.
Review of Zsolt Komáromy, Figures of Memory: From the Muses to Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics. The Scriblerian 45:2 (Spring 2014): 195-197.
“Modernities, Polite and Vicious.” Review essay on Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800; and Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. Huntington Library Quarterly 76.2 (2013): 309-315. [Note: link is to a PDF file.]
Review of Oliver Lindner, “Matters of Blood”: Defoe and the Cultures of Violence (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010). Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries 4.1 (Fall 2012): 79-82.
Review of Elaine McGirr, Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009). Eighteenth-Century Studies 44.1 (2010): 140-42.