Dana Lew

My research examines the relationship between travel literature and the early novel in the long eighteenth century. Seeking to destabilize conventional assessments of the rise of the novel, I reconsider canonical texts (such as Robinson Crusoe and Humphry Clinker) alongside lesser-known travel narratives through book historical, postcolonial, and critical Indigenous perspectives. My current chapter considers "The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman" (1778) as a novel that satirizes Captain Cook's voyages to the Pacific by bringing together the factual fictions from earlier in the century with Scottish Enlightenment stadial theory.

List of Publications

Peer-Reviewed Publications:

• “‘Savage’ Idolatry: Jodocus Crull, Defoe, and the Robinson Crusoe Sequels,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, 2025, accepted.
• Co-authored with Thomas Keymer, “Reading Defoe with Rawson,” Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature 9, no. 1, March 2025, 74–100. 
• “Peter Williamson (1730–99),” Biography for the Grub Street Project, February 2025.
• “Introduction to Miscellaneous Poems (1779) by Ewan Clark.” Laurence Sterne and Sterneana: Cambridge Digital Library, Cambridge, 2022. 
• “Yorick’s Regional Jargon: Sentimentality, Sterne, and the Cumberland Book Trade,” The Shandean 32, 2021, 92–126.

Book Reviews:

• “Nicholas Seager and J. A. Downie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe,” The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats 57, forthcoming 2025.
• “Robert G. Walker, The Liverpool Library as Laurence Sterne Subscriber,” The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats 56, forthcoming 2024.
• “Robert G. Walker, Pursuing the Identities of Sterne’s Subscribers Down Genealogy’s Garden Path,” The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats 56, forthcoming 2024.
• “Leah Orr, Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670–1750,” The Review of English Studies 75, no. 319, 2024, 261–3.
• “Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster (eds.), Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production,” The Review of English Studies 74, no. 315, 2023, 573–5.
• “Jacob Sider Jost, Interest and Connection: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano,” The Review of English Studies 73, no. 308, 2022, 181–3.

Conference Presentations:

• “Eating People and Genres in The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman,” British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Oxford, UK, January 2025.
• “From ‘Indian Peter’ to Obadiah Lismahago: Transatlantic Hybridity in Peter Williamson’s Captivity Narrative and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto, ON, Canada, April 2024.
• “Crusoe and Captivity,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, St. Louis, MO., USA, March 2023.

Fellowships and Awards:

• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award, 2022–25
• Lilly Offenbach Strauss Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, awarded by the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, Victoria College, University of Toronto, 2025
• Nominated for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies President’s Prize, Pembroke College, University of Oxford, 2025
• Summer Thesis Fellowship, University of Toronto, 2024
• Conference Grant, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto, 2023
• Travel Grant, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto, 2022–23.
• Canadian Graduate Scholarship: Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement at Oxford University, 2022
• Brian Corman Graduate Prize, University of Toronto, 2021
• Ontario Graduate Scholarship, 2019–20, 2021–22
• Maclaren Gold Medal in English, Victoria College, University of Toronto, 2019
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Master’s Award, 2019
• Viola Whitney Pratt Memorial Scholarship in English, University of Toronto, 2019