Elizabeth Neiman

Associate Professor
English

Elizabeth Neiman is an Associate Professor in English and also the Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Her research interests include British Romanticism, history of the novel, feminist theory, and questions concerning humanism and its alternatives. Her first book, Minerva’s Gothics: the Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1785-1820 (2019), puts the work of popular Romantic-era novelists back into conversation with canonical writers, from William Wordsworth to Mary Wollstonecraft to Percy Shelley. She is working on a new book project titled Romantic Longings and the Novel, 1782-1861: Sensing Imagination’s Limits. Here, she hopes to illustrate that women writers of the Romantic period write novels that expose the racialized and gendered underpinnings of empathy as it was currently being defined as the capacity to feel for and with another, so as to reveal its prospects and limits—both in interpersonal relationships and in art.

Professor Neiman teaches introductory courses in both WGS and English, as well as upper-level and graduate courses in British Romanticism, the Victorian era, and feminist and queer theory. She also offers upper-level literature courses that are cross-listed with WGS and designed to draw in students from two disciplinary perspectives (both English and WGS). These courses focus on contemporary literature, by mostly cis and trans gender women, and with an intersectional lens of analysis.

Courses Taught

English 170;

Also courses in the following areas, at both the undergraduate and graduate level:
Romantic-era literature
Victorian literature
Gender Studies; feminist and queer theory

Minerva’s Gothics: The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1785-1820 (March 2019, University of Wales Press)

What Has Been (1802). Introduced and edited by Jonathan Sadow and Elizabeth Neiman. Routledge Press (September 2025)

“Breaking open the Vaults: The Critical Recovery of Non-Canonical Texts” for The Routledge Companion to Gothic Women Writers, in collaboration with Hannah Hudson.Editors Deborah Russell, Laura Kirkley, and Daniel Cook (submitted to editors, October 2025)

“A Critical Turn Inwards in The Woman of Colour (1808): on Teaching Romanticism Now,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 36:3 (July 2024), pp. 459-484.

Elizabeth Neiman and Dylan Dryer, “In Which an Academic Couple Considers a Curious Convergence of their Fields,” Lit2Lit, eds. Jonathan Alexander and Eli Goldblatt, Utah State UP (in press). 

Elizabeth Neiman and Yael Shapira. “Introduction: Biography and the Woman Writer Revisited.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, v. 52 (2023), pp. 291-296. 

“Self-haunted Heroines: remapping the generic ‘I’ back into Romantic subjectivities,” Lost Legacies—Women Authors and Early Gothic Literature, ed. Kathleen Hudson (University of Wales Press, fall 2020). 

Introduction to and co-guest editor of (with Tina Morin at the University of Limerick) special issue for Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, “The Minerva Press and the Romantic-Era Literary Marketplace” 23 (summer 2020), pp. 11-20

“Painting the Soul: A Complex Legacy of Romanticism in Edith Johnstone’s New Woman Novel, A Sunless Heart, 1894,” 26:4 Women’s Writing(2019), 365-80. 

Critical/biographical entry on Eliza Kirkwood Mathews, for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women’s Writing, ed. Natasha Duquette, Palgrave, 2024.

Critical reviews for The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820. Ed. April London. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2021

            -Pilkington, Miss. Delia: a Pathetic and Interesting Tale, 1790.

            —, Rosina, 1793.

            —, The Subterranean Cavern: Memoirs of Antoinette de Montflorance, 1798.

            —, The Accusing Spirit: De Courcy and Eglatine, 1802.

-Pilkington, Mary. Sinclair: the Mysterious Orphan, 1809.

-Davenport, Selena. The Sons of the Viscount, and the Daughters of the Earl, 1813.

            —, The Hypocrite: or, the Modern Janus, 1814.

            -Hatton, Ann. Sicilian Mysteries: the Fortress Del Vechii, a romance, 1812.

            —, Conviction, or She is Innocent!, 1814.

—-, Chronicles of an Illustrious House: the Peer, the Lawyer, and the Hunchback, 1816

Book reviews:

Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Lauren Gillingham (Cambridge 2023), Studies in Romanticism (in press, October 2025)

Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era by Hannah Doherty Hudson (Cambridge 2023), Eighteenth-Century Fiction (July 2024)

Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Bronté by Devoney Looser (Bloomsbury 2022) and On Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Susan J. Wolfson (Columbia UP, 2023). European Romantic Review (March 2024).

Servants and the Gothic, 1764-1841: A Half-told Tale by Kathleen Hudson, 33:2 Eighteenth-Century Fiction (winter 2021), p. 295-8

Publications related to work in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies

One Site Ranks Maine Fourth for Women but there is More to the Story.” Bangor Daily News, Bangor, Maine, April 1, 2016.

Cisgender is now in the dictionary: it reminds us to reflect on our gender.” Bangor Daily News, Bangor, Maine, July 10, 2015.

Lessons about Gender in Dress Codes.” Bangor Daily News, Bangor, Maine, October 3-4, 2015.

Neiman, M., J. M. Logsdon, and E. Neiman. 2015. “Asexual reproduction.” Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Chichester, 2015.

Portrait of Elizabeth Neiman
Associate Professor
Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies