Olivia Carpenter

Olivia Carpenter is a Lecturer in Literature whose research focuses on Black Studies, Critical Race Theory, and literary history. Her first book, Marriage Interruptus: Black Marriage Interrupted in Domestic Fiction, 1791-1853, examines Black characters in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British marriage plots. In this project, Olivia gives an account of how the politics of slavery and Abolition influenced the novel as a genre during the height of Abolition struggles in British courts as well as Black resistance to slavery in both Britain and the colonies. Olivia employs interdisciplinary methods in this and other projects, incorporating approaches from legal studies, studies of women, gender, and sexuality, art and visual studies, and material history. She also takes interest in how eighteenth-century literature and culture continues to make claims on our own twenty-first-century moment, particularly with respect to questions of race and racism, and has published essays on this topic in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

Olivia completed her PhD at Harvard University in 2021. While at Harvard, Olivia taught courses on global literatures, Critical Race Theory, gender studies and queer theory, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and existentialist philosophy