Hi! I have a PhD in English and teach at the University of Maine at Farmington. I study Jane Austen and other long eighteenth-century and turn-of-the-nineteenth-century women writers. I have edited a collection of essays, Transatlantic Women Travelers: 1688-1843, which was published by Bucknell University Press in 2021.
I am working on my book, Jane Austen’s Monsters, which analyzes the role of monsters in Austen’s writings, real-life relationships, and adaptations. Inspired by the 2009 Austen monster mashups and Donald Greene’s 1975 essay also called “Jane Austen’s Monsters,” this project asks the question, how and why are Austen’s life and works ripe for the monster treatment?
Usually when people think of Austen and monsters Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes to mind, and people either love or hate what it did to Austen’s plot and characters. Except for my own essays on the monster mashup Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, most scholarship on the monster mashup subgenre has brushed it off as a fleeting fad and a travesty that bears little importance to our study of Austen. I argue the opposite. Early 21st-century monster mashups are not far off from Austen’s early 19th-century world: “monsters” have been in Austen’s life and works the entire time.
Research on Jane Austen’s juvenilia brought me to England in July and August 2017. As the Jane Austen Society of North America’s International Visitor, I conducted research at Chawton House, Jane Austen’s House and the Hampshire Record Office. I visited sites and many of the bicentenary exhibits as a part of my research, too, and took walks as a part of my research. I also used my time in England to prepare for a future study abroad course, titled “Jane Austen in England.”
This website includes blog posts from my six-week stay in England as well as posts related to my work on Jane Austen. You will also find posts about professorial fashion. I call these posts “What Professors Wear.” I also blog about a lot of other things, like Austen-adjacent series (such as Sanditon and Bridgerton).
The site provides a CV page with links to my publications and details about my research interests and teaching experience. It also provides information about my breast cancer memoir, The Roller Coaster: A Breast Cancer Story.
On another page in this site, I have added samples from my students’ individual wiki projects from a summer online Austen course.
Misty Krueger 