Terry F. Robinson

Associate Professor and Associate Chair of English and Drama; Graduate Faculty; Associate Faculty, Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies (CDTPS); Affiliate Faculty, Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture (BHPC)

On Leave

July 01, 2023 to December 31, 2023
Jackman Humanities Building, Room 903, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8. Maanjiwe nendamowinan Building, Room 5264, 1535 Outer Circle, Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6.

Campus

Fields of Study

Areas of Interest

  • Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture
  • Romantic-Period Literature and Culture
  • Drama and Theater, 1660-1900
  • Body and Performance Studies
  • Material and Visual Culture
  • Art and Aesthetics
  • History of the Novel
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Women Writers

Biography

Terry F. Robinson specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She is currently finalizing a monograph entitled Reading the Acting Body in the Romantic Age: Performance and Its Truth Effects, 1750-1830, which examines how eighteenth-century histrionic theory and practice influenced literary, artistic, and cultural innovation in the Romantic period. She is also at work on a second book project that examines the politics and poetics of nonbeing in literature and art from the early modern era to the present day. A former fellow with the Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University) and the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA), her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Life, European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and BRANCH, among others. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder and, prior to her appointment at the University of Toronto, was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan.

Office Hours

By Appointment.

Publications 

Books

Reading the Acting Body in the Romantic Age: Performance and Its Truth Effects, 1750-1830. Forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830. Ed. with Diane Piccitto. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

Romanticism and Vision. Ed. with John Savarese. Special Issue of the European Romantic Review 33.4 (2022).

Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780-1860. Ed. with Monika Class. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.

Editions 

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777). Intro. and Contexts. Under contract with Broadview Press.

Mary Robinson, Nobody: A Comedy in Two Acts (1794). Intro., Notes, and Contexts. Romantic Circles. Web. March 2013.

Selected Articles & Book Chapters 

"Deafness in Britain, France, and America: 1700-1900." The Oxford Handbook of Disability and Literatures in English: 1700-1900. Ed. Essaka Joshua. Oxford: Oxford UP. In progress.

"According to Sarah Siddons." The Cambridge History of Women and British Romanticism. Ed. Julie Carlson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. In progress.

"The History of Sophia Shakespear" (1753), and "Chit-Chat; or Natural Characters; and The Manners of Real Life" (1755). The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820. Ed. April London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Forthcoming.

"Mary Robinson." The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Ed. Natasha Duquette. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming.

"The 1794 Macbeth and Its Conjuring Effects: Rethinking Romantic-Era Spectatorship." The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre. Ed. with Diane Piccitto. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. 25-57.

"Introduction: Romanticism, Visuality, and the Theater." The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre. Ed. with Diane Piccitto. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. 1-22.

"Deaf Education and the Rise of English Melodrama." Essays in Romanticism 29.1 (April 2022): 1-31.

"Introduction: Romanticism and Vision," with John Savarese. Special Issue of the European Romantic Review. 33.4 (2022): 451-460.

"Interview with Joseph Roach." Eighteenth-Century Studies 53.2 (Winter 2020): 181-190.

"The Romantic Actor as Artist." Keats-Shelley Journal 68 (2019): 166-168.

"Eighteenth-Century Connoisseurship and the Female Body." Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford UP. Web. 10 May 2017.

"Becoming Somebody: Refashioning the Body Politic in Mary Robinson's Nobody." Studies in Romanticism 55 (Summer 2016): 143-184. Revised and Reprinted in Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Gerald Egan. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 63-99. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, vol. 246, ed. Carol A. Schwartz (2022): 267-285.

"National Theatre in Transition: The London Patent Theatre Fires of 1808-1809 and the Old Price Riots." BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Web. 29 March 2016.

"'The glass of fashion and the mould of form': The Histrionic Mirror and Georgian-Era Performance." Eighteenth-Century Life 39.2 (April 2015): 30-65.

“‘Life is a tragicomedy!': Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and the Staging of the Realist Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 67.2 (September 2012): 139-176.

"John Philip Kemble." The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee, and Diane Long Hoeveler. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 2: 723-730.

"Sarah Siddons." The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee, and Diane Long Hoeveler. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 2: 1252-1261.

“Mary Robinson and the Dramatic Art of the Comeback,” with Michael Gamer. Studies in Romanticism 48.2 (Summer 2009): 219-256.

"Introduction," with Monika Class. Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780-1860. Ed. Monika Class and Terry F. Robinson. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 1-20.

“James Kenney.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 344: Nineteenth-Century British Dramatists. Detroit: Gale, 2008. 206-224.  

“James Kenney’s Comedic Genius: Early Nineteenth-Century Character, Commerce, and the Arts in Raising the Wind, The World!, and Debtor and Creditor.” Literature Compass 3.5 (Aug. 2006): 1082-1106.

“‘A mere skeleton of history’: Reading Relics in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.” European Romantic Review 17.2 (Apr. 2006): 215-227.

Interviews and Online Writing 

"On This Day in 1824: The African Theatre and Ira Aldridge." BARS Blog: 'On This Day' Series. Forthcoming Jan. 2024.

Interviewed by Tanya Rohrmoser. "Dramatic Effects: Terry F. Robinson Receives James L. Clifford Prize for Study of Deafness in British Theatre." Office of the Vice-Principal Research (OVPR), University of Toronto Mississauga. Online. 25 July 2023.

"The David Garrick Monument, Westminster Abbey." RÊVE: Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition. Ed. Nicola Watson and Catriona Seth. European Romanticisms in Association. Online. 19 May 2023.

Interviewed by Scott Rayter, "Connoisseurship: Is It Time for a Comeback?" The Art Newspaper (August 5, 2021).

"Celebrity Couture: A New Trend? Fashionista Mary Robinson Led the Way - Over 230 Years Ago." The 18th-Century Common. Ed. Andrew Burkett and Jessica Richard. Web. 1 August 2017.

 "Fashionable Vice in 1790s England: Mary Robinson’s Nobody." The 18th-Century Common. Ed. Andrew Burkett and Jessica Richard. Web. 3 June 2013.

Book and Theatre Reviews

Rev. of Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain, by Ros Ballaster (The Boydell Press, 2020). Eighteenth-Century Studies. Forthcoming 2023.

Rev. of Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt, and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News, by Jonathan Mulrooney (Cambridge UP, 2019). Studies in Romanticism (Summer 2020): 257-261.

Rev. of Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England, by Jim Davis (Cambridge UP, 2015). The Wordsworth Circle 47.4 (Autumn 2016): 200-202. 

Rev. of She Stoops to Conquer. By Oliver Goldsmith. Dir. Martha Henry, The Stratford Festival, Stratford, ON, May 16-Oct. 10, 2015. Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 30.1-2 (May 2016): 121-127.

Rev. of The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737-1832, edf. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford UP, 2014). Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2015): 735-41.

Rev. of The Beaux' Stratagem. By George Farquhar. Dir. Antoni Cimolino, The Stratford Festival, Stratford, ON, July 31-Oct. 11, 2014. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 28.2 (2014): 71-76.

Rev. of Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium 1770-1790, by Daniel O’ Quinn (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011). The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.2–3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 307-312.

Rev. of The Plays of William Godwin, ed. David O'Shaughnessy (Pickering & Chatto, 2010) AND William Godwin and the Theatre, by David O'Shaughnessy (Pickering & Chatto, 2010). British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) Bulletin and Review 39 (Dec. 2011): 20-22.

Administrative Service

Chair, English & Drama