Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature

Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1990 and taught at Yale University until moving to UC Santa Barbara in 1996. Her research interests include letter-fictions, theater studies, poetry, and natural history in early modern British culture. In Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (1996), she examined how epistolary novels play with and against print culture (Montesquieu, Richardson, Riccoboni, Crèvecoeur). Her recent research focuses on early modern writing about the natural world, with articles on avian migration, botany and gender, and ‘global’ flora. She’s currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled “Talking Trees: Ethics and Others in Long-Eighteenth-C. British Literature,” which considers the history of environmental ethics in writing about trees and forests.

Select EH Courses: Cultures of Nature in the 18th Century; Writing Nature in 18th Century; Nature and Value in Long-Eighteenth-Century British Culture; Nature in Wordsworth, Dickinson, Bishop; Cultural Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century British Literature; Making Up Monsters; Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Nature and Value in Eighteenth Century British Culture; and Writing Early Modern Nature