Nancy Armstrong, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture and Media, and Gender Studies at Brown University, will present “Locke, Defoe's ‘Journal of the Plague Year’, and the Politics of Incorporation” Friday, March 3, 2006, from noon-1 p.m. in Hamilton Smith 101 at the University of New Hampshire. The talk, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, is free and open to the public.

Armstrong’s paper explores John Locke's philosophy of how individuals are formed. She will look at Locke's formulation of the individual in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” as a defensive reaction to the mass body as represented by the print material Defoe assembled in “A Journal of the Plague Year.”

Armstrong received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1977 and her B.A. from SUNY Buffalo in 1966. Her fields of interest include 18th and 19th century British and American fiction, empire and sexuality, narrative theory, critical theory, and visual culture. She is author of “How Novels Think: British Fiction and the Limits of Individualism” (forthcoming, Columbia University Press); “Fiction in The Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism” (Harvard University Press, 1999); with Leonard Tennenhouse “The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, And The Origins Of Personal Life” (University of California Press, 1992); “Desire And Domestic Fiction: A Political History Of The Novel” (Oxford University Press, 1987); and nearly 100 articles, chapters, and reprints on the historical semiotics of literature, gender, and visual culture. Armstrong is also managing editor of “Novel: A Forum on Fiction” and co-editor of “Encyclopedia of British Literary History” (Oxford University Press, 2005).