Nicole Mansfield Wright is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she is also a Research & Innovation Office Faculty Fellow. Her first book, Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel, was published in 2020 by the Johns Hopkins University Press and is now available for purchase.
Her research focuses on the power of literature and media to influence people’s choices either to remain faithful to traditional legal practices, political structures, and scholarly institutions, or to embrace newer, more inclusive methods of governing, adjudicating, and seeking knowledge. It spans a number of areas: the literature and culture of the so-called “long eighteenth century” (1688-1830) in Britain and its colonies; the theory and development of the novel; the history of ideas, encompassing theories of race; and the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities.
In 2015-16, she was a Lapidus Long-Term Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Her research has also been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Folger Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Robert M. Leylan Fellowship, and UC Berkeley SROP.
Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies; Eighteenth-Century Fiction; The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; The Toronto Quarterly; The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel: 1660-1820; The Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Emotion (2021); and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Other publications are forthcoming.
Wright received her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Yale University, and her B.A. in English (Honors, with University Distinction) from Stanford University, where she was a President’s Scholar. She also studied at Corpus Christi College at Oxford University (UK).