Letter from the Chair
Dana Rabin
Associate Professor of History
Associate Professor of LAS Global Studies
Contact Info
- Address: 446D Gregory Hall
- Telephone: 333-1155
- Email: drabin@illinois.edu
- CV: Download my C.V.
Office Hours
Thursday 3:00-4:30 and by appointmentAreas of Specialization
Early modern Britain, legal, cultural, and gender history
Specializations / Research Interest(s)
- The social and cultural history of early modern Britain; empire, race, and nation in Britain; Britain in the global eighteenth-century; early modern Jewish history; the Jewish Atlantic world; the history of crime; the history of emotion; women and gender in early modern Europe; Anglo-American legal history
Research Description
Dana Rabin specializes in the history of eighteenth-century Britain
with an emphasis on crime, law, gender and race. her first book, Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England, is a study of the language of mental states in the English courtroom. The book sets legal sources within a cultural context to reveal the relationships between emotion, responsibility, gender, and citizenship in the eighteenth century.Her current project examines intersection of
metropole and colony through an analysis of legal events involving criminal
trials, law suits, legislation and riot that unfolded in London in the second half of the eighteenth
century. This litigation became newsworthy because each instance revolved
around the presence of outsiders at home. These legal cases became scandals
because they exposed the contradictions in Britain's ideology of equality,
rights, and freedom and the imbrication of metropole and colony. In this period
the boundary between empire and home was not clearly drawn: this study uses legal
events as a prism through which to analyze the complexities wrought by empire
and how the law created, delineated, maintained and managed categories of difference.
Education
- Ph.D. University of Michigan 1996
Publications
Books
- Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England. . New York: Palgrave, 2004.
Book Contributions
- "The Sorceress, the Servant, and the Stays: Sexuality and Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain." Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Empire. . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 252-273.
- "Bodies of Evidence, States of Mind: Infanticide, Emotion, and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century England." Infanticide: Historical Perspectives, 1550-2000. . London: Ashgate, 2002. 73-92.
Journal Articles
- "'In a Country of Liberty?': Slavery, Villeinage and the Making of Whiteness in the Somerset Case (1772)." History Workshop Journal Autumn.72 (2011):
- "Seeing Jews and Gypsies in 1753." Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): 35-58.
- "The Jew Bill of 1753: Masculinity, Virility, and the Nation.." Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.2 (2006): 157-171.
