Headshot of Erin Pearson

Erin Pearson

Associate Professor of English

Department: English

Office and address: Alamance Building, Office 305F 2338 Campus Box Elon, NC 27244

Phone number: (336) 278-5782

Brief Biography

Erin Pearson is a literary scholar whose interdisciplinary research focuses on the discourse on slavery, the construction of race, and nineteenth-century American and transatlantic literature.  Before becoming an Assistant Professor of English at Elon University, she was a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester.  Her scholarly monograph Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World is under contract at the University of Virgina Press.  Her research has also appeared in ELH, MELUS, Arizona Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, College Teaching, and the Norton Critical Edition of Absalom, Absalom!

News & Notes

Education

  • Ph.D. in English - University of California, Irvine                                
  • M.A. in English - University of California, Irvine
  • A.B. in English - Harvard University

Courses Taught

  • Narratives of Slavery Before and After Emancipation
  • How Poetry Works
  • Applied Literature: Health and Business
  • Race, Memory, and the “Lost Cause”: The Road to Charlottesville (COR Capstone Seminar)
  • Early American Gothic Literature (American Literature Before 1865)
  • Literary Studies: Theories and Methods
  • Writing: Argument and Inquiry

Research

  • American Literature to 1900
  • Slavery in Literature and Culture
  • African-American Literature
  • Transatlantic Literature
  • Race Formation
  • Consumption and Culture
  • Popular and Material Culture

Current Projects

Dr. Pearson’s book, Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, is forthcoming from University of Virginia Press.  It argues that evolving ideas about consumption revolutionized how slavery was understood.  The rise of mass abolitionism in the late eighteenth century coincided with a shift in the common usage of “consume,” which started to mean “purchase” in addition to “use up.”  Purchasing had particular relevance to slavery in the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries, an era in which millions of enslaved people were sold in the transatlantic and U.S. domestic slave trades and slave-grown commodities like sugar and cotton became commonplace purchases for ordinary consumers.  Her approach combines the examination of rare archival materials like songbooks and political cartoons with extended close readings of major works by writers including Olaudah Equiano, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass.

Publications

Scholarly Monograph

Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (under contract at University of Virginia Press in the Carter G. Woodson Institute Book Series: Black Studies at Work in the World)

Peer-Reviewed Articles

  • “Metanarratives of Slavery.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 47.4 (2022), 1-21.
  • “So What? Teaching Disciplinary Skills and Purpose With Nontraditional Assignments.” College Teaching 70.4 (2022), 541-48.
  • “Consuming Monsters: Hungry Animals in the Discourse on Slavery.” Arizona Quarterly 77.2 (Summer 2021), 25-53.
  • “‘A Person perverted into a Thing’: Cannibalistic Metaphors and Dehumanizing Physicality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Abolitionism.”  ELH 83.3 (Fall 2016), 741-69.
  • “Faulkner’s Cryptic Closet: Forbidden Desire, Disavowal, and the ‘Dark House’ at the Heart of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Mississippi Quarterly 64.3 (Summer 2011), 341-67.

Book Chapters

  • “Faulkner’s Cryptic Closet: Forbidden Desire, Disavowal, and the ‘Dark House’ at the Heart of Absalom, Absalom!”  Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, edited by Susan Scott Parrish, Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton, 2023, 558-79.