Rebecca Tierney-Hynes
Senior Lecturer
- English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
Address
- Street
-
Rm 2.10
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LH
Availability
Office hour: Tuesdays 2-3pm
Please email for an appointment at an alternative time.
Background
Rebecca Tierney-Hynes studied at the University of Toronto (PhD), and taught at Suffolk University and the University of Waterloo before coming to Edinburgh in 2017. Her current interests include eighteenth-century comedy and the history of Scottish theatre. Her book, Laughing Matters, is under contract with OUP and a comprehensive article on eighteenth-century Scottish theatre history is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Scottish Theatre. Her first book, Novel Minds (Palgrave 2012), was on eighteenth-century fiction and empiricist models of literary absorption. She has also published on eighteenth-century drama, novel form, humours theory, secret history, and political celebrity.
Undergraduate teaching
The Queer Eighteenth Century
The Novel and the Modern Self
Staging Enlightenment: Theatre 1660-1780
Early Modern Tragedy
Early Modern Comedy
The Novel in the Romantic Period
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
Rebecca is happy to entertain proposals in any area of eighteenth-century literature and culture. She particularly welcomes projects on fiction or drama before 1780, and on eighteenth-century intellectual history.
Past PhD students supervised
Kyle Malashewski - University of Waterloo PhD 2017
Research summary
Rebecca specialises in eighteenth-century fiction, drama and literary criticism. She is primarily interested in eighteenth-century theories of spectatorship and histories of emotion.
Current research interests
At the moment, she is working on a second monograph, tentatively titled 'Laughing Matters: Comedy, Sympathy and the Ethical Spectator, 1660-1750' (under contract with OUP's 'Textual Perspectives' series). In this book, she explores the way eighteenth-century comic playwrights and literary critics seize upon and rework empiricist notions of self-making in ways that ultimately allow us to see how our attachments to comic objects produce the mimetic emotions that define sympathy. She is also working on a new project with Brianna Robertson-Kirkland (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) on Scottish drama and music in the eighteenth century called 'Cultures of Performance in Eighteenth-Century Scotland'.Past research interests
Rebecca has published on ideas about fiction and theories of reading in empiricist philosophy; comedy and early political economy; tragedy and the ethics of spectatorship; and secret history, celebrity, and political representation.Knowledge exchange
Rebecca's current project, 'Laughing Matters', is funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Past funded projects have included a fellowhip with the Centre for the History of Emotions in Australia and an Insight Grant, awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research on comedy and emotion.
Current project grants
Laughing Matters: Comedy, Sympathy and the Ethical Spectator, 1660-1750 - Leverhulme Research Fellowship Sept 2019-Dec 2020
Past project grants
Funny Feelings: Eighteenth-Century Comedy and the History of Emotion - SSHRC Insight Grant 2017-2020 - Declined
The Afterlife of Genre - Early Career International Research Fellowship - ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion Jan-Mar 2016