JHI Undergraduate Fellow
A&S English (specialist) and Latin (major)
Supervisor: Urvashi Chakravarty, UTSC English
Dr. Jan Blumenstein Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Amy Zhao is a fourth-year English specialist and Latin major at the University of Toronto. She is the past Editor-in-Chief of Trinity Review and the current president of the English Student Union. For the past two years, she has served as a research assistant to Professor Pamela Klassen, working to produce a decolonized glossary and timeline for a teaching curriculum of Treaty 3. She has also worked as a research assistant for The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt with Professor Angela Esterhammer as well as Literature, Politics, and Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Henry Fielding and the Trade of Authoring with Professor Thomas Keymer.
Fellowship Project—Labouring in Vain: Domesticity, Reproduction, and Female Identity in Romantic and Gothic Literature
Female labour in the upper-class society in late 18th and 19th century Britain typically encompasses domestic and reproductive labour. Yet, there is widespread boredom amongst these women despite the domestic occupations available. I am examining how resistance against labour and the adoption of boredom is an attempt to undermine the patriarchal desire to construct female identities through the labour they can perform. In my project, I will be looking at popular fiction of the Romantic and Regency periods and applying feminist concepts regarding female labour and boredom that began to emerge in the 19th century.