William Christmas

Professor Christmas earned his B.A. at the University of Vermont, and his M.A. and Ph.D in English at the University of Washington. He teaches courses on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, women writers, the novel, Aphra Behn, literature and film, and Jane Austen. His research focuses on eighteenth-century British poetry (particularly by laboring-class writers), poetic form and genre, textual studies, and theories of class and gender. He is the author of The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830 (Delaware, 2001) and the editor of Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, vol. 1, 1700-1740, (Pickering & Chatto, 2003). His most recent essays include “Lyric Modes: The Soliloquy Poems of Mary Leapor and Ann Yearsley” (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Spring 2015) and “The Verse Epistle and Laboring-Class Literary Sociability from Duck to Burns” (The Cambridge History of Working-Class Writing, forthcoming). Professor Christmas also curates a long-term digital humanities project, Poetical Scavenger: An Annotated Miscellany of Eighteenth-Century Poems, that features the work of SF State undergraduate and graduate students in English. Their work can be seen here.

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