Megan Matchinske

Professor of English & Comp Literature (3225)

534 Greenlaw
Campus Box 3520
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
919-962-4058 (phone)
matchin@email.unc.edu

A.B. Duke University, 1979
M.A. University of California, San Diego, 1990
Ph.D. University of California, San Diego, 1993

Research Interests

Megan Matchinske's current research involves an edition (part of the Other Voice series) that focuses on the Mary Carleton bigamy trials and a book project that examines moments of rupture in historical memory—interruptions to and failures in political, religious, economic or cultural transfer in early modern culture. It considers how early modernity deals with historical loss and how women in particular accept or deny erasures of the past. Informed by the work of Paul Ricoeur—this study explores the relationship between forgiving and forgetting as both are epistemologically constructed within and across domains in seventeenth-century England.

Her first book was Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject (Cambridge University Press, 1998). A second book project grew out of her interest in history and historical trajectory. Women Writing History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009) considers what it means for early modern women writers and postmodern women critics to engage history as a strategy, to make the past mean something, arguing that historical narrative becomes for us a way to investigate how human action functions in time, how the various pasts that we know impel us to be responsible citizens.

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