SUNY Plattsburgh Faculty Profile - Dr. Anna Batigelli

August 18, 2009

Margaret Cavendish As Social And Political Critic

Anna Battigelli's Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (University Press of Kentucky, 1998) was selected as a Choice Outstanding Title. Battigelli was the first to explore Cavendish's intellectual life and to place Cavendish's work firmly within the context of seventeenth-century political, religious, and philosophical thought.Dismissing the myth of Cavendish as an isolated and lonely thinker, Battigelli argues that Cavendish assumed the role of exile as a rhetorical stance, one that allowed her to address and criticize kings, queens, and the leading thinkers of her day.Dr. Battigelli is currently completing a second book, "John Dryden and English Catholicism." It traces Dryden's conversion to Catholicism, and explores the impact of that conversion on his subsequent work. Work on this project was facilitated by spending the 2004-2005 academic year at Notre Dame University, where she was a Carey Senior Fellow at Notre Dame's Erasmus Institute.Promoted to the rank of full professor in 1999, Dr. Battigelli has published articles and reviews on all aspects of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literary culture. She has been invited to lecture at Downside Abbey, Auburn University, Harvard's Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, and the CUNY Graduate Center's Eighteenth-Century Seminar. She is currently 2nd Vice-President for the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

In addition to receiving a Fellowship at Notre Dame University's Erasmus Institute, Battigelli has been a Long-Term Fellow (one of four nationally) at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a James Marshall Osborn Fellow at Yale University's Beinecke Manuscript and Rare Book Library. She has received two stipends from the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H.), and has been selected to attend two N.E.H. Summer Institute/Seminars. She has also held a Folger Shakespeare Library Short-Term Fellowship.She serves frequently as a panel reviewer for the N.E.H. and has been a book review editor and editorial board member for 1650-1850: Ideas, Inquiries, and Aesthetics in the Early Modern Era. She often serves as an external reviewer for other institutions' tenure and promotion cases and has also reviewed graduate dissertation theses and undergraduate honors' theses.Dr. Battigelli contributes generously to the SUNY, Plattsburgh campus, mentoring new faculty within the humanities and serving as a highly acclaimed teacher. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Michigan and a B.A. degree in English from the University of North Carolina.