Jennifer MacLure

Dr. MacLure joined the Kent State English department in 2017. She studies nineteenth-century literature and culture, focusing on three overlapping areas of inquiry: economics and emotion, medicine and the body, and race and imperialism. Across her research, she explores the interactions that literature illuminates between micro-level experiences and macro-level political and economic systems: how do political and economic systems shape or delimit the kinds of interpersonal interactions that are possible in a society? And how do everyday interactions between individuals produce, shore up, or disrupt large-scale systems?

Her recent book, The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2023) investigates this interplay between individual and system in the context of the rise of free market capitalism. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, MacLure explores the feelings that surround capitalism’s death function—that is, the feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. She argues that Victorian authors present capitalism’s death function as a sticking point, a series of contradictions, and a problem to solve as characters grapple with systems that allow, demand, and cause the deaths of their less fortunate fellows. Examining both canonical and lesser-known works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, William Morris, and George Eliot, The Feeling of Letting Die shows capitalism as not straightforwardly imposed via economic policy but instead as a system functioning through the emotions and desires of the human beings who enact it.

Selected Articles:

• “Unnatural Resources: The Colonial Logic of the Holmesburg Prison Experiments.” Journal of Medical Humanities 42 (2020): 423–433.
• “Undiagnosing Esther: The Productive Ambiguity of Disease in Bleak House.” Dickens Studies Annual 51.1 (2020): 95-122.
• "Diagnosing Capitalism: Vital Economics and the Structure of Sympathy in Gaskell's Industrial Novels." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 38.5 (2016): 343-352.
• "Rehearsing Social Justice: Temporal Ghettos and the Poetic Way Out in "Goblin Market" and "The Song of the Shirt.'" Victorian Poetry 53.2 (2015): 151-169.

Courses Taught:

• ENG 6/72291: Victorian Literature. (graduate)
• ENG 6/76706: Methods in the Study of Literature. (graduate)  
• ENG 49091: Senior Seminar: Charles Dickens.
• ENG 39395: Special Topics: Contagion Narratives.
• ENG 34021: Women’s Literature.
• ENG 34004: British Literature, 1800-1900.
• ENG 25002: Literature in English II.
• ENG 24001: Introduction to Literary Study.
• HONR 10297: Freshman Honors Colloquium – Detective Fiction.