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Hannah Blanning is a PHD candidate specializing in British and French Romantic era literature. Her research revolves around gender, autonomy, relationality, embodiment, and the relationship between radical ontologies and politics. Exploring women’s writing as a space where abstract philosophical ideas and material embodiment of those merge in dynamic interplay, her dissertation, entitled “The Ethics of Thriving: Love and Relational Autonomy in Women’s Literature 1725-1826,” argues that while predominant Enlightenment philosophical traditions championed individual free will as paradigmatic of freedom and subjectivity, certain women writers—including Eliza Haywood, Germaine de Staël, Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley—offered alternative understandings of agency by narratively portraying the extent to which human interactions and environments shape and affect our ability to flourish. Employing Benedict Spinoza’s radical ethics and relational understanding of autonomy as its critical aperture, her project examines how these authors break down binaries by unearthing love as an inter-relational locus of growth that leads to collaboration, rational thinking, virtue, freedom, and democratized political practices.

Hannah has shared her research at conferences and events organized by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, the British Association of Romantic Studies, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, the British Women Writers Association, and the North American Spinoza Society. Her work can also be found in the Keats-Shelley Journal+ Special Issue on Commonplacing and Commonplace Books.

Before joining the English Department, Hannah lived in France for twenty years where she coordinated college and secondary English programs while teaching literature and composition to bilingual students. She received a BA of Humanities and MA of Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado and holds an M2 of English Literature from the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre. Since commencing her doctoral studies, she has served as a lead organizer for the 2024 British Women Writers Conference, co-chair of the 18/19 Group, and as an Engaged Arts and Humanities Cohort Scholar. Hannah has also fostered pedagogical development as a Lead Graduate Part-Time Instructor and Center for Teaching and Learning Literature Lead. She is mother to twins: Virgile and Anaïs.