PGR supervision: Dr Sara Read and Dr Clare Hutton
Amelia Mills is a final year PhD student examining Aphra Behn's romantic fictions and poetry, particularly those that used French sources, in the late seventeenth century. She has specific interests in English and French women’s writing, French to English translation and cultural transmission, and the history of emotion, seventeenth-century literature, and early eighteenth-century literature.
Amelia’s thesis, entitled ‘‘The Translatress in her own Person speaks’: How Aphra Behn re-framed dynamics of love, courtship, and desire, using her French sources’, will be submitted in July 2022. It was funded as part of the AHRC sponsored project, ‘Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age’.
Amelia has presented research at, and contributed to the organisation of, various national and international conferences, workshops, and seminars. She has won various financial awards for attendance. Most recent awards include:
The Postgraduate and Early Career Scholar Conference Award of £100 for presentation at BSECS (British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) annual conference in January 2022. The paper, entitled “Reclaiming the ‘Carte de Tendre’: Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Tallemant, and Aphra Behn”, was with the WSG 1558-1837 panel.
The Keymer CSECS (Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) Award of $500 (CAD) for presentation at their ‘Translation and Appropriation in the Long Eighteenth Century’ conference in October 2022. The paper was entitled ‘Women’s access to scientific learning: Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) and Aphra Behn’s A Discovery of New Worlds (1688)’.
Links to online publications:
December 2021: Entry on Elizabeth Wilmot Countess of Rochester for The Palgrave Enyclopedia of Early Modern Women Writers
Other forthcoming publications:
Summer 2022: “Addressing misogyny through the ‘Carte de Tendre’. Tracing a map of courtship from Madeleine de Scudéry’s French salons to Aphra Behn’s English readers”, Women’s Writing special Issue, Early Modern Textual Misogynies.
Summer 2022: ‘Overcoming barriers to educated discourse: A Discovery of New Worlds (1688), Translation and Aphra Behn’s ‘passionate thirst of knowledge of the mind’. (Peer-reviewed chapter with Routledge’s Edited Volume ‘(Re)thinking translations’.
Summer 2022: Encyclopedia entry for Marie Desjardins in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women Writers
Autumn 2022: ‘Silencing through Translation and Aphra Behn’s La Montre’, Études Internationales sur le Dix-huitième siècle (proceedings of the 2018 ISECS Seminar for ECRs).
Forthcoming 2023: Chapter entitled ‘Madeleine de Scudéry, Aphra Behn and Translation. Using the ‘Carte de Tendre’ for cross-channel communication of women’s ideas’ to the WSG Book Project, Global Exchanges.
Forthcoming 2023: Chapter for the Routledge book publication, Ideas across Borders: Political Texts and Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, in collaboration with ‘Translating Cultures: Translation, Transmission and Dissemination of Printed Texts in Europe 1640-1795’, a network that brings together intellectual history with the material history of book and translation studies.
Amelia has taught on the first-year undergraduate module entitled ‘Analysing Poetry: Metre Form and Meaning’, the first-year undergraduate module entitled ‘Theory that Matters’, and the third-year undergraduate module entitled ‘The Child and the Book’.
Before the PhD Amelia had a career as a primary school teacher. She has welcomed the chance to draw upon the transferable skills from that role when teaching undergraduate students at Loughborough.