Professor, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
rking@english.ucsb.edu
Rachael King researches and teaches the literature and media of the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in epistolary writing, newspapers and periodicals, and the history of the book. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) and The Book of Improvement: Media Landscapes in the Global Enlightenment (forthcoming, Yale University Press); editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (University of Virginia Press, 2020); and co-editor, with Seth Rudy, of The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Her articles and essays have appeared in PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Studies, New Literary History, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Aeon, among other venues. Her hybrid memoir-cultural history, How Much, How Little: A Memoir of Reimagining Care, is under contract with One Signal Publishers. She is also the Project Director and Principal Investigator for the Ballitore Project, a project combining archival research and computational analysis that has been funded by the UC-HBCU Initiative, the NEH, and the ACLS.
Rachael completed her Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She has received numerous travel and residential fellowships, including from the British Academy, the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, the Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship, and the Bibliographical Society of America, and she is a Senior Fellow in the Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. Before returning to academia, she was a news reporter at the New Haven Register, Bend Bulletin, and Anniston Star.