Frances Ferguson

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Frances Ferguson (born 23 August 1947), a foremost theorist of representation and culture, teaches courses in eighteenth and nineteenth century materials and twentieth century literary theory. Ferguson is currently Mary Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She has previously taught courses on: the rise of novelism in the eighteenth century; various kinds of writing--poetic, novelistic, and essayistic--in the Romantic period; the rise of educational philosophy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the rise of legal philosophy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; twentieth century literary theory; and the poststructuralist critique of the social sciences (with particular interest in why psychoanalysis was its central target). She is also active in Johns Hopkins University's Program for Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

She has written three books (Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 1977; Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, 1992; and Pornography, The Theory, 2005) and essays on a variety of eighteenth and nineteenth century topics and literary theory. She is currently working on a project that aims to identify the difference that Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Bentham's work on children and education made to their accounts of modern democratic political liberalism.

Students working with her have written on a variety of topics (including Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s debts to philosophy, the importance of property law for the depiction of female character in the eighteenth century, the critique of marriage that develops in and around the Victorian novel, the importance of historicism in the eighteenth century, the relationship between narratives and justice, and the history of experiments on children)etc.