Dr. Jennifer L. Hargrave

Interests

British Romanticism
Global Eighteenth Century
Historical British and Chinese Relations
British Representations of World Religions
Women’s and Gender Studies
Literary Theory 

Education

Ph.D. Rice University
M.A. Rice University
M.A. University of Colorado at Boulder
B.A. The Colorado College

Courses Taught

• ENG 2301: British Literature
• ENGL 3341: Writers of Color and their Allies
• ENGL 3342: Global Romantic Literature, 1770–1865
• ENG 3351: British Literature, Nineteenth Century to the Present
• ENG 4354: Romantic Poetry
• ENG 4355: Romantic Prose
• ENG 4370: Women Writers
• ENG 5340: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature
• ENG 5350: Early English Romantic Literature

Bio

Jennifer L. Hargrave’s research explores Britain’s global encounters across the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the Romantic era. Her research has focused primarily on Anglo-Chinese relations prior to the first Opium War. Her nearly complete book project—The Romantic Reinvention of Imperial China, 1759–1842—recovers a history of intellectual exchanges between the British and Chinese empires. Most recently, her studies have turned toward British understandings, representations, and constructions of Islam. 

Her publications appear in such venues as 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and The Wordsworth Circle. She has served in editorial roles with the academic journals Global Nineteenth-Century Studies (2021–2025) and SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (2023–2024).

Publications

“The Sinological Erasure of Chinese Morality, 1800–1820,” Studies in Philology 123, no. 1 (2026). 

“Subversive Sketching: Intratextual Debate in British Accounts of China, 1797–1805,” Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 3, no. 2 (2024): 147–169.

“Speaking in Voices: The South African Poetry of Thomas Pringle,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 27 (2022): 238–258. 

“Robert Morrison and the Dialogic Representation of Imperial China,” in Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham. (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020): 152-168. 

“Silencing China’s Poetic Voices.” The Wordsworth Circle 51, no. 2 (2020): 184-204. 

“Marco Polo and the Emergence of British Sinology.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 56, no. 3 (2016): 515–37. 

“Romanticizing the Chinese Landscape.” European Romantic Review 27, no. 3 (2016): 413­–21. 

“Romantic Pretexts: Victorian Literary Appropriations in Anglo-Sino Discourse,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 37, no. 1 (2015): 21–41. 

“‘To the Glory of the Chinese’: Sinocentric Political Reform in Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 1 (2015): 31–50.