Carrie
Shanafelt
Carrie Shanafelt is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature and philosophy of the long eighteenth century in Great Britain and the Americas. Her research engages with eighteenth-century legal and economic theory, ethics, gender, sexuality, slavery, and aesthetics. She also serves as the chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture.
2026 Lillian F. and William L. Silber Professor of the Year
Book:
Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (University of Virginia Press, 2022)
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
"Jeremy Bentham meets the unaccountability machine," Journal of Bentham Studies 24.1 (2026)
"Ottobah Cugoano on British Slavery, National Debt, and Speculative Finance," Journal of Modern Philosophy 6.2 (2025)
“Jeremy Bentham and the Pleasures of Fiction,” Revue d’études benthamiennes 20 (2021)
“‘A World of Debt’: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, The Wealth of Nations, and the End of Finance,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 55.1 (2021), pp. 21-43
“Jeremy Bentham and the Aesthetics of Sexual Difference,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 61.3 (2020), pp. 335-352
“Against Rights: Jeremy Bentham on Sexual Liberty and Legal Reform,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 31.3 (2020), pp. 203-221
“On Teaching Early Gothic Fiction and Non-Empiricist Aesthetics,” College English Association Forum 43.2 (2014), pp. 1-18
“Vicarious Sex and the Vulnerable Eighteenth-Century Reader,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 24.4 (2013), pp. 261-277
Book Chapters:
“Doubt,” Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, ed. Jack Lynch, Oxford Univ. Press (2022), pp. 567-581
“The ‘Plexed Artistry’ of Nabokov and Johnson” Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists, ed. Anthony Lee (Clemson: Clemson Univ. Press, 2019), pp. 165-187
“The Rhetoric of Consensus: Hume and Fielding on Moral Sentiment” David Hume: A Tercentenary Tribute, ed. Stanley Tweyman (Ann Arbor: Caravan, 2013), pp. 85-106
Other:
Review of Mattie Burkert, Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688-1763, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 56.4 (2023), pp. 649-651
Review of Christopher Looby, ed., The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman and other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories, in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 12.1 (2022)
Review of Katherine Binhammer, Downward Mobility: The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel, in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 11.2 (2021)
Review of Paul Kelleher, Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, in The Shandean 27 (2017), pp. 158-159
Review of Hannah Lavery, The Impotency Poem from Ancient Latin to Restoration Literature, in Renaissance Quarterly 69.2 (2016), pp. 796-798