Michelle Faubert

Professor University of Manitoba, Romantic Literature & Visiting Fellow, Northumbria University

  • Winnipeg MB

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

Education/Learning
Entertainment
International Affairs
Performing Arts
Print Media
Research

Areas of Expertise

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

SSHRC Insight Grant

2015 - 2020

SSHRC Insight Grant, “Romanticism and Revolutionary Suicide” ($145,697)

Gerda Henkel Stiftung Research Scholarship

2014 - 2016

Visiting Fellow, Northumbria University

2010 - 2016

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Education

University of Toronto

Ph.D.

University of Regina

M.A.

University of Regina

B.A.

Affiliations

  • Visiting Fellow Northumbria University

Media Appearances

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...

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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...

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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...

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Event Appearances

“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

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Research Grants

“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

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Partnerships

Collaboration for SSHRC Insight Grant

Leigh Wetherall-Dickson Northumbria University

Wetherall-Dickson is international collaborator on Insight Grant

Articles

Granville Sharp's manuscript letter to the admiralty on the Zong massacre: a new discovery in the British Library

Slavery and Abolition

2016

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...

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Introduction: Romanticism and Suicide

Literature Compass

2015

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...

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The Fictional Suicides of Mary Wollstonecraft

Literature Compass

2015

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)...

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