Michelle Faubert
Professor | University of Manitoba, Romantic Literature & Visiting Fellow, Northumbria University
Winnipeg, MB, CANADA
Professor of Romantic Literature in the Department of English, Film and Literature
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Biography
Michelle Faubert is a Professor of Romantic literature at the University of Manitoba in Canada and a Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University in England. Her publications include the monograph _Granville Sharp's Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre_ (Palgrave, 2018), _Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists_ (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) and articles on Romantic-era literature and psychology, early feminism, abolition, and suicide. She also co-edited and contributed to _Romanticism and Pleasure_ (Palgrave, 2010) and co-edited a volume of English medical texts about depression from 1660-1800 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012). Her editions of Mary Shelley's _Mathilda_ and Mary Wollstonecraft’s novellas, _Mary and The Wrongs of Woman_, were published by Broadview Press (2012, 2017), and her transcription of the _Mathilda_ manuscript is also published in the _Shelley-Godwin Archive_ (2020). Her current monograph projects are on suicide in the Romantic era, for which she has received a five-year SSHRC grant.
Industry Expertise (6)
Education/Learning
Entertainment
International Affairs
Performing Arts
Print Media
Research
Areas of Expertise (15)
Romanticism
Representation of Suicide
History of Psychiatry
Historical Feminism
Literature of Sensibility
Literature and Medicine / Science
Foucauldian Theory
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Shelley
Granville Sharp
New Historicism
The Scottish Enlightenment
Constructions of Identity
Madness in Literature
Early Abolition
Accomplishments (5)
SSHRC Insight Grant (professional)
2015 - 2020 SSHRC Insight Grant, “Romanticism and Revolutionary Suicide” ($145,697)
Gerda Henkel Stiftung Research Scholarship
2014 - 2016
Visiting Fellow, Northumbria University
2010 - 2016
University of Manitoba Merit Award for Teaching and Research
2013
Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence Award: Probationary Faculty category
2012
Education (3)
University of Toronto: Ph.D.
University of Regina: M.A.
University of Regina: B.A.
Affiliations (1)
- Visiting Fellow Northumbria University
Links (2)
Media Appearances (5)
Talk openly about suicide
Winnipeg Free Press
2015-10-30
Last week, it was reported Nunavut Premier Peter Taptuna declared suicide in the territory a crisis, an announcement that resulted from a coroner's inquest into suicide in the territory in September...
Professor finds lost 232-year old letter condemning slave massacre
UM Today
2015-08-17
British Library unaware it had Granville Sharp’s 1783 missive on the Zong massacre until University of Manitoba professor inadvertently discovers it. In the Rare Book Room of the British Library, while perusing a volume of “comparatively unimportant pamphlets” from the 18th century, U of M professor Michelle Faubert saw something unusual – beautiful handwriting. “I thought, Why is this beautiful handwriting in with this book of published [pamphlets]?… I just couldn’t believe it. I could hardly keep still. I knew I was on to something,” Faubert says...
Romantic idea of suicide explored in presentation about Goethe novel
CBC News
2014-03-10
Michelle Faubert, professor of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba is giving a talk on the subject and tenor Robert MacLaren, also from the U of M, will sing some arias from the opera as part of the event. "I think that one of the main reasons why that notion was so attractive to people was that it suited the taste for excess emotion that was so celebrated in romantic era literature," explained Faubert...
The Werther Effect and Romantic-era Perceptions of Suicide
CBC MB Interview
2014-03-10
Michelle Faubert, professor of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba is giving a talk on the subject and tenor Robert MacLaren, also from the U of M, will sing some arias from the opera as part of the event...
The Werther Effect and Romantic-era Perceptions of Suicide
Millenium Library
2014-03-10
Michelle Faubert (English, Film and Theatre, UManitoba) will discuss Romantic-era notions of suicide as both a theme in literature and as an influential component of debates about human rights. Robert MacLaren (Music, UManitoba), accompanied by Laura Loewen (Music, UManitoba), will perform two short arias from Massenet’s opera...
Event Appearances (5)
“Mary Shelley’s Mathilda and ‘The Mourner’: Travel, Isolation, Suicide”; conference paper
RSAA (Romantic Studies Association of Australasia) Biennial Conference Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
2017-07-26
“Encrypted Secrets, Cultural Discontent, and a New Letter by Granville Sharp”; conference paper
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Berkeley University, California, USA
2016-07-26
“Goethe’s and Massenet’s Werther: Music, Text, and the Werther-effect”; lecture
Massenet's Werther Manitoba Opera
2017-07-26
Pre-show presentation on Romantic-era culture for Giselle;
Ballet: "Giselle" Centennial Hall, Winnipeg
Pre-theatre presentation on _Jane Eyre_
_Jane Eyre_ play Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre
Research Grants (5)
“Romanticism and Revolutionary Suicide”
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
5-year Insight Grant (2015-20)
"Romanticism and Suicide"; Gerda Henkel Stiftung Research Scholarship
Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Germany)
2014-16 research grant
2014 UM/SSHRC Research Grant
University of Manitoba and SSHRC
2014 research grant
RH Award, U of M; for excellence in research in the humanities
University of Manitoba
2010
Association of Commonwealth Universities Titular Fellowship: The Gordon and Jean Southam Fellowship
Association of Commonwealth Universities, UK
2010
Partnerships (1)
Collaboration for SSHRC Insight Grant
Leigh Wetherall-Dickson Northumbria University
Wetherall-Dickson is international collaborator on Insight Grant
Articles (4)
Granville Sharp's manuscript letter to the admiralty on the Zong massacre: a new discovery in the British Library
Slavery and Abolition2016 During research at the British Library (BL) in May 2015, I discovered a previously unknown manuscript letter from 1783 by Granville Sharp to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. The document concerns the case of the infamous Zong slave ship: Sharp wrote the letter to demand that the Admiralty bring murder charges against the crew of the Zong...
Introduction: Romanticism and Suicide
Literature Compass2015 This essay introduces the issue of Literature Compass that explores the topic of female suicide and Romantic literature, culture, and criticism. Although little critical work has been published on suicide and Romanticism to date, the subject addresses concerns that several major recent works on Romanticism have studied, such as the body and medicine, psychology, violence, and protest against political and domestic tyranny. Historically, too, the topic of Romanticism and suicide appears tangentially in well-known scholarship about melancholy, madness, genius, the sublime, and the transcendental...
The Fictional Suicides of Mary Wollstonecraft
Literature Compass2015 Suicide conveyed several distinct meanings in the Romantic period – unlike today, when it is most often attributed to mental illness. This meaning also existed in the long eighteenth century, but it was understood more broadly as irrationality and popularized through the emphasis on extreme passion and emotionalism as related to suicide in the literature of sentiment. William Godwin capitalized on this widely recognized and – to some extent – culturally ameliorative significance of suicide by casting his dead wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, as a character in a novel of sensibility when he reported her two suicide attempts in the Memoirs (1798)...
A Family Affair: Ennobling Suicide in Mary Shelley's Matilda
Essays in Romanticism2013 Mary Shelley's 1819 novella, Matilda was published for the first time in 1959. Most scholars point to the scandalous subject matter of father-daughter incestuous passion as the root of the problem for publication, but this essay argues that the scandalous incest plot is largely a vehicle Shelley uses to explore another shocking topic: the right to commit suicide. The incest theme of Matilda serves Shelley's main argument that suicide may be regarded as virtuous, honourable, and even socially beneficial...
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