Kelly McGuire

Assistant Professor (English and Gender & Social Justice)
B.A. (Queen’s); M.A. (Western); Ph.D. (Western)

Office: Lady Eaton College N 130.1
Telephone: (705) 748-1011 ext. 7574
E-mail: kellymcguire@trentu.ca

Research interests

Kelly McGuire is an Associate Professor in the departments of English and Gender & Social Justice. 

Her research falls into the category of the Health Humanities, as she works on the cultural representation of disease from the eighteenth century to the present. She continues to write on suicide, elegy, mourning, and death (her first book was Dying to Be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity), but her chief interest is in the development of medical individualism in the West and the role that it has played in complicating public health initiatives since the eighteenth century. Her current projects include a book manuscript, Reading Inoculation: Gender, Medicine and the Body, and research on the cultural construction of immunity and vaccine hesitancy (through a gender and social justice lens).
 

Selected Publications

"COVID-19, Contagion and Vaccine Optimism." The Journal of Medical Humanities (forthcoming 2021)
 

 “Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition” in The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature (Ed. W. Michelle Wang; forthcoming in 2021). 
 

 "I leave thee not": Felicia Hemans and Maternal Suicide.” Studies in the Literary Imagination. 5. No. 1, (2020): 121-137. 
 

“Death by Inoculation: The Fashioning of Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Smallpox Pamphlets.” Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Eds. Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall Dickson.  London: Palgrave (2016): 189-206. 

"`[M]ost plain, rational, and easie': Rhetorical Disavowal in Early Eighteenth-Century Inoculation Pamphlets," Rhetoric Review. 37:2 (2018): 168-180. 

 Dying to be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity: 1714-1814. London: Routledge (March 2013).
 

"True Crime: Print Culture, Contagion, and Herbert Croft's Love and Madness; or, A Story Too True." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24:1 (2011): 55-76. 

“Raising the Dead: Sermons, Suicide, and Transnational Exchange in the Eighteenth Century.” Literature and Medicine 28:1 (2009):9-26. 
 

 “Mourning and Material Culture in Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 18:3 (2006): 281-304.