Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Jolene Zigarovich
2025-2026
Home institution
University of Northern Iowa
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
History of ideas
Law
Literature
Theme(s)
Contemporary violence & Justice
Gender, Family & Youth
Identity
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Jolene Zigarovich teaches and researches at the crossroads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century body politics, death studies, and queer and trans studies, with particular emphasis on the history of the novel. She regularly teaches courses on the long eighteenth century, women writers, Romanticism, and Gothic literature. In Spring 2021 she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh and in 2021-22 was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam. She is author of Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives, and editor of Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature as well as TransGothic in Literature and Culture. Her monograph Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) had the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currently, she is working on two new book projects that engage law and literature, Victorian Necropolitics: Legislating the Dead Body and the Novel, 1847-1874 and Legal Bodies: Women, Economies, and the Law in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.
Research Project
Legal Bodies: Women, Economies, and the Law in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Research question: What roles did women’s bodies and emotions play in court as they navigated the British legal system? How does narrative jurisprudence develop as a political strategy and critique for women writers?
This project argues that the female body–central to the legality of birthright and legitimacy–is presented as a form of extralegal evidence in eighteenth-century courts and British novels.
Jolene Zigarovich distinguishes this argument by uncovering court cases where female emotion, resemblance, and virtue become part of the proceedings and jurist decisions.
The project then identifies a shift in the latter half of the century, when women’s success within the legal system declines, and narrative jurisprudence responds by depicting women inheriting, bequeathing, and claiming birthright through their own private means.
Zigarovich’s main claim is that unlike the law, fiction more often allowed women possibilities for agency and private identity. Working with law and affect theory, chapters in this book examine how emotional and coercive aspects of female birthright and inheritance cases are reworked and reimagined by female novelists, suggesting that narrative becomes a more reliable space for women to be active legal and moral agents.
Research Interests:
History of the British novel; Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British literature; Gothic literature; Women and eighteenth-century law; narrative jurisprudence; affect theory and legal evidence; female agency in literature