- Ph.D., English, Stanford University, 2003
- B.A., English, University of Maryland, 1997
Jesse Molesworth
he/him/his
Associate Professor, English
Director of Graduate Studies
Director, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies
- jmoleswo@iu.edu
- Ballantine Hall 456
- Office Hours
Education
About Jesse Molesworth
My research explores the culture of the European Enlightenment, especially including the history and theory of the realist novel. In my first book Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge UP, 2010), I argued that realist novel arose not so much in conjunction with ascendent scientific concepts of chance and probability but, rather, in reaction to them. Rather than reifying a newly secular cosmos, in other words, the realist novel served to re-enchant it. In my second book Forms of Time, Newton to Austen (Stanford UP, 2026), I argue, similarly, that the novel, even in its realist mode, sought not so much to understand the world through Isaac Newton’s physicalist description of “absolute” time. Rather more radically, the novel offers various forms—especially including epistolarity, seriality, and free indirect discourse—as a means of escaping the reality of Newtonian time. This thesis guides my readings of fictions by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and many others, as well as my research into culture of time and temporality, as seen in the rise of the orrery and in the passage of the Calendar Reform Act of 1752, by which Great Britain and its colonies changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
I have published elsewhere on figures such as Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Olaudah Equiano, the Gothic novel, William Hogarth, and many others, in such scholarly venues as ELH, MLQ, Criticism, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, as well as the Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire and the Oxford Handbook of Henry Fielding. I also serve on the editorial board of the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Finally, I have, for many years, directed the Bloomington Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, an interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in the history and culture of the long eighteenth century. In this capacity, I convene a national book prize (the Kenshur Prize, honoring the year’s best book on eighteenth-century studies) as well as an annual Spring Workshop, devoted to such topics as “The Magical Eighteenth Century,” “Eighteenth-Century Afterlives,” and “1776 in the World.” Please do visit our open-access journal The Workshop for various proceedings related to the Center’s activities.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
“Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of Temporality,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (forthcoming)
“The Clock and the Calendar,” in Thomas Keymer and Henry Power (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to Henry Fielding (Oxford, forthcoming).
“Introduction: The Temporal Turn in Eighteenth-Century Studies,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 60 (Summer 2019): 129-38.
“Graphic Satire: Hogarth and Gillray,” in Paddy Bullard (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (Oxford, 2019): 298-319.
“The Cosmic Sublime: Wright of Derby’s Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery,” Lumen: Selected Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2015), ed. Allison Conway and Mary Helen McMurren: 109-21.
“Gothic Time, Sacred Time,” MLQ 75.1 (March 2014): 29-55.
“Comics as Remediation: Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism,” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 7.1 (2013). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v7_1/molesworth/
“Sterne Studies on the Eve of the Tercentenary,” Literature Compass 9.7 (July 2012): 453-63. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lico.2012.9.issue-7/issuetoc
“Syllepsis, Mimesis, Simulacrum: The Monk and the Grammar of Authenticity,” Criticism 51.3 (Summer, 2009): 401-23.
“‘A Dreadful Course of Calamities’: Roxana’s Ending Reconsidered,” ELH 74.2 (2007): 493-508.
“Equiano’s ‘Loud Voice’: Witnessing the Performance of The Interesting Narrative,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 48.2 (2006): 123-44.
Recent Talks:
“Temporal Geocentrism,” ASECS annual meeting, Denver, CO (2018)
“Clockwork Gothic: Walpole/Woolf,” A Literary Walpole Weekend, Lewis Walpole Library (2017)
“Nature’s Arrow, History’s Cycle,” Novel Knowledge: A Conference Honoring John Bender (2016)
“1752: Temporality and Fictionality,” ASECS annual meeting, Los Angeles, CA (2015)
“Time and the Cosmos: The Orrery in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination,” Eighteenth-Century Seminar, The Newberry Library, Chicago (2013)
“Of Plagues, Cannibals, and Zombies: Daniel Defoe and the Origins of the Zombie Plot,” Zombies vs. Professors conference, Louisville (2012)
“A Reply to the Question: ‘Can Narratives Enlighten?’” ASECS annual meeting, San Antonio (2012)
“The Hour of the Uncanny: Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe,” ASECS annual meeting, Vancouver (2011)
“Gambling in Narrative, Gambling as Narrative,” Narrative conference, Cleveland (2010)
“The Gambler’s Plot: Modern Culture and the Problem of Randomness,” New Directions in Eighteenth-Century Studies workshop, Indiana University, 2008.
“Narrative Re-Enchantment: Sterne, Hume, Freud.” Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, 2008
“Can the Novel Enlighten?”, Harvard University, Columbia University, Concordia University, 2007
“Humean Realism: Fielding’s Amelia and the Problem of Induction,” ASECS annual meeting, Montreal, 2006
“Natural Preternaturalism: The Gothic Novel and the Rise of Tarot Cartomancy,” SUNY-Binghamton, University of Western Ontario, University of Southern California, Clark University, 2004-6
Selected Honors and Awards
· Cox Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University, Spring 2024
· College of Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) Research Fellowship, Indiana University, Spring 2020
· College of Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) Symposia and Conferences grant, for “New Perspectives on the Rise of the Novel,” Indiana University, 2015-16
· Honorable Mention, Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize, awarded to Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, by the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN), 2012
· Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, 2006-8
· Mabelle McLeod Lewis Dissertation Fellowship, Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, Stanford University, 2001-3
· Key Scholar, College of Arts and Humanities Senior Scholar, Joyce Tayloe Horrell Scholarship for Academic Promise in English Literature, University of Maryland, 1992-7
Two-Minute Lecture Series
English professor Jesse Molesworth gives a two-minute lecture on the themes of Black Hole by Charles Burns. The twelve-issue, limited edition comic book series deals with the aftermath of a sexually transmitted disease that causes grotesque mutations in Seattle teenagers in the mid-1970s.
The College of Arts