Concise Collections: Teaching Margaret Cavendish, Part II

Authors

E Mariah Spencer, Northern Illinois UniversityFollow
Tiffany Potter, University of British ColumbiaFollow

Author Biography

E Mariah Spencer is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in English from The University of Iowa. She currently serves as the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies and Coordinator of Educator Licensure in English at Northern Illinois University. Her research interests include female authorship, early modern science, science fiction and weird fiction, educational reform, and play as pedagogy. Tiffany Potter is Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia, working in eighteenth-century studies in the Department of English. In 2020, she was awarded the 3M National Teaching Fellowship, Canada’s highest honour in university teaching and educational leadership.

Abstract

The Winter 2024 edition of ABO continues the Concise Collections on Teaching series, centering on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), an "also/and" author whose expansive work defies singular categorization. Cavendish’s prolific corpus engages with a wide array of subjects, from materialism and scientific anti-realism to gender, education, and cognition. Her writings bridge both literary and philosophical traditions, blending speculative fiction with critiques of mechanistic science, particularly through her explorations of weird fiction and proto-scientific thought.

Keywords

Pedagogy, Philosophy, Science, Materialism, Weird Fiction, and British Literature

Recommended Citation

Spencer, E Mariah and Potter, Tiffany (2024) "Concise Collections: Teaching Margaret Cavendish, Part II," ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol.14: Iss.2, Article 8.
http://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.14.2.1438
Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol14/iss2/8