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Dr Rachel Sulich

Dr Rachel Sulich

  • Position: Research Associate and Teaching Fellow
  • Areas of expertise: Eighteenth-century literature and culture; sentimental fiction; philosophical understandings of voluntary death; eighteenth-century conservatism; medical humanities; the history of emotions.
  • Email: R.Sulich@leeds.ac.uk
  • Location: 7.02.03 Cavendish Road

Profile

After obtaining my PhD from Leeds in 2017, I spent two years working in University outreach and widening participation. I returned to the School of English in September 2019 in a teaching and research capacity. I have teaching responsibilities on undergraduate core modules and act as a Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded ‘Sheridan Project’ (see: https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/dir-record/research-projects/622/the-sheridan-project).

Research interests

My research examines the representation of suicide – or ‘voluntary death' – in literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. I am particularly interested in the intersection between acute emotional discomposure and bodily distress as imagined by novelists, philosophers and physicians of this period. My doctoral thesis, entitled, ‘Voluntary Death in the Sentimental Tradition’, makes the case for sensiblity’s fatal agency in eighteenth-century literature. I argue that the literature of sensibility is more inwardly-turned, more concerned with inner turmoil and self-doubt than has been critically assumed.

I am currently working on two smaller projects: the first concerns duelling as a form of self-destruction in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; the second examines the private deaths of public men, specifically politicians and government officials, in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.  

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

  • PhD in Eighteenth-Century Literature (School of English, University of Leeds)
  • MA in Romantic Literature and Culture (School of English, University of Leeds)
  • BA in English Language and Literature (School of English, University of Leeds)

Professional memberships

  • British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • British Association for Romantic Studies

Student education

I teach eighteenth-century and romantic-period literature at undergraduate level.