Rachel Schneider's Courses

Rachel Schneider is a doctoral candidate and an assistant instructor in the University of Texas at Austin's Department of English.  She has also served as the assistant director for the English Department's Sophomore Literature Program in the 2010-2011 school year. She holds a BA with distinction in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia, and an MA in English from the University of Texas at Austin.  Her master's report, entitled "'What Every Gentleman Ought to Be': Anti-Dueling Rhetoric and the Christian Hero in Barrow, Steele, and Richardson," examines the place that arguments against dueling hold within modeling ideal masculine behavior in eighteenth-century religious and literary discourse. Her dissertation "Some Versions of the Fragment, 1700-1800" examines permutations of the eighteenth-century literary print fragment.

Rachel has presented four papers at academic conferences: one paper entitled "Edited Expressions: Silence and Form in The Memoirs of Emma Courtney" at the 2009 Conference for the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; a second paper (co-presented with Sarah Orem), "OMFGG: Advertising Class Mobility and Ambivalent Spectatorship in the CW’s Gossip Girl," at the 2009 Midwest MLA Convention; a third paper entitled "A Life in Ruins: Sympathy, the Self, and the Sublime in Smith and Burke" at the 2009 Conference for the Canadian and Northeast American Societies for Eighteenth Century Studies; and a fourth paper on Georgette Heyer and the novel of manners at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Albuquerque. She also co-chaired a panel on "Pauses, Stops, and Fitful Starts: Eighteenth-Century Punctuations" with Kevin Bourque at the 2011 ASECS annual meeting in Vancouver. She has contributed reviews of Samuel Baker's Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture and David Fincher's The Social Network to the E3W Review of Books.

Currently Rachel blogs about musicals, pop culture, and other forms of visual rhetoric for the Digital Writing and Research Lab's blog viz.