Rachel Trubowitz and Brigitte Bailey have published new books that focus on the contribution of women to society in the 17th and 19th centuries.

Rachel Trubowitz, professor of English, has authored Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature, published by Oxford University Press (USA). Her book connects changing seventeenth-century English views of maternal nurture to the rise of the modern nation, especially between 1603 and 1675. Maternal nurture gains new prominence in the early modern cultural imagination at the precise moment when England undergoes a major paradigm shift -- from the traditional, dynastic body politic, organized by organic bonds, to the post-dynastic, modern nation, comprised of symbolic and affective relations.

Brigitte Bailey, associate professor of English, has co-edited Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth Century American Women Writers & Great Britain, published by the University Press of New England. In this volume, 15 scholars from diverse backgrounds analyze American women writers' transatlantic exchanges inthe nineteenth century. They show how women writers (and often their publications) traveled to create or reinforceprofessional networks and identities, to escape strictures on women and African Americans, to promote reform, to improve their health, to understand the workings of other nations, and to pursue cultural and aesthetic education.