Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow —Sarah Rivett

Sarah Rivett

Sarah Rivett’s main teaching and research interests include the literature and culture of early America and the early modern Atlantic world with additional interests in gender studies, race, theology, and the history of science. Foregrounding an interdisciplinary approach, her work examines the intersections between science, religion, and literature from the Puritan quest for knowledge of elect souls to revivals in the age of the Enlightenment to mesmerism in antebellum reform literature. Her current book project, The Science of the Soul, argues that our long-standing and hitherto unchallenged sense of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment is not only inaccurate but also obscures the complex process through which early modernists thought they knew God. Examining an archive of conversion testimonies, The Science of the Soul shows that Calvinists were just as interested as Baconians in applying the experimental method and that testimonies by Anglo women, Native Americans, and children were central to a long, transatlantic history of Enlightenment empiricism. An additional project will explore Native American languages and American literary history from 1640 to 1820. Professor Rivett has published in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, and William and Mary Quarterly and is the recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her research has been supported by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Huntington Library, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.