Taylor Rousselle

My current research, supervised by Dr. David Hensley, uncovers women’s contributions to the turbulent eighteenth-century metaphysical debate over the body which have been overlooked due to their being embedded in works of fiction. Reading female-authored prose from the British Enlightenment alongside various philosophical tracts and treatises, I aim to demonstrate fictive literature’s unique capacity to allow women to both express and disseminate philosophical thought without fear of repercussion for entering the “masculine” space of “serious”—that is, non-fiction—writing. It is thus my goal (and the goal of my work) to both challenge current scholarly positions on what generically constitutes the discipline of philosophy and to expose a dark history of the Enlightenment’s oppression of female intellectual voices; an oppression so powerful that it led these women to disguise their desire to transcend their physical, gendered bodies within their works of fancy.