Danielle Bobker, PhD

Education

BA, Honours, English & Drama, with High Distinction, University of Toronto 
BEd, English, Drama, & French, University of Toronto 
MA, English, Concordia University 
PhD, English, Rutgers University 

My first book, The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy (Princeton 2020), shows how private rooms known as closets shaped all kinds of interpersonal relationships in eighteenth-century Britain, including the virtual intimacies between readers and the authors of printed books. 

More recently, my interests have shifted to satire and humour. My current project, "Ward v. Quebec: A Case for Literary-Critical Humour Studies" (SSHRC IDG, 2024-2026), analyzes how the Supreme Court of Canada reinforces problematic assumptions about the harmlessness of humour in their 2021 ruling in favour of Quebec comedian Mike Ward. An upcoming Applied AI working group will explore the relationships between AI, humour, and human rights. My new book in progress, "Flayed: How to Talk about Jokes without Hurting Anyone," is a guide to having more nuanced disagreements about old and new jokes that draws on both these strands of research, and more.

I would love to hear from potential doctoral students whose research interests, like mine, lie at the intersections of critical humour studies, satire studies, gender and sexuality studies, and eighteenth-century British literature and culture

Research, teaching, and supervision interests

17th- & 18th-century literature

gender & sexuality

feminisms

intimacy & affect

cultural and material cultural studies

pedagogy

Book

The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Essays

"Satire and Offensive Humor," Options for Teaching Modern British and American Satire, eds. Evan Davis and Nicholas D. Nace, Modern Language Association Press, 2019.

“Toward a Humor-Positive Feminism: Lessons from the Sex Wars," Online: Los Angeles Review of Books (17 December 2017) and Print: Special Issue: Comedy, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal 17 (February 2018), 48-57.

“Coming Out: Closet Rhetoric and Media Publics,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 5.1 (Spring 2015) 31-64.

"The Literature and Culture of the Closet in the Eighteenth-Century: A Pedagogical Resource,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and his Contemporaries 6.1 (October 2014) 70-94.

"Intimate Points: The Dash in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” Papers on Language and Literature 49.4 (2013) 1-29.

"Female Favouritism, Orientalism, and the Bathing Closet in Memoirs of Count Grammont," Eighteenth Century Fiction 24.1 (2011) 1-30.

"Lady Mary’s Imperfect Employment,” Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-18301 (2011)1-23.

"Sodomy, Geography, and Misdirection in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," Special ed. Novelists on the Novel / La Poétique des romanciers, Eds. Isabelle Daunais and Allan Hepburn. University of Toronto Quarterly 79.4 (2010) 1035-1045.

"Carriages, Conversation, and A Sentimental Journey," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 35 (2006) 243-66.

Reviews

With Joseph Drury, McKenzie Lee, The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue.The Eighteenth Century Commons (April 2018).

Claude Rawson, Swift's Angers, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.1 (Fall 2015) 104-106.

Chloe Wigston Smith, Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.2 (January 2015) 309-311.

"Belle: A New View of Eighteenth-Century Racism," ABO Public: Interactive Forum for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 (August 25 2014).

with Meredith Evans, “Why We Love Paulo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place," Lemon Hound (September 27 2013).