Professor Lynn Festa

Lynn Festa is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on the role played by literary form in the elaboration of emerging categories of human difference in Britain, France and their colonies. Drawing on literature, art history, the history of science and technology, animal studies, material culture, and postcolonial theory, her work addresses the ways literary genres and tropes help produce the thresholds between self and other, human and animal, person and thing, in the age of Enlightenment. Her current project, Humanity in the Making: Action and Accountability in the Age of Enlightenment, argues that eighteenth-century writers did not treat the human as a demarcated class, recognized by its conformity to a pre-fabricated template, but instead sought to define humanity by what it could make (the capacities of humans as opposed to animals and machines) and by what it had made (the works that constitute human civilization and the depredations wrought by it). Focusing on artistic, technical, economic and political processes that designated the abilities humans possessed and the instrumental uses to which they could be put, the book examines how Enlightenment humanity was conceived not in theory but in practice.