Essaka Joshua
Professor
Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London; Fellow of the Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame; Fellow of John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, University of Notre Dame
- Office
- 271 Decio Faculty Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556 - Phone
- +1 574-631-4573
- ejoshua@nd.edu
Areas of study
- British - 18th and 19th
Education
Ph.D., University of Birmingham, UK
M.A., University of Oxford, UK English Literature and Language
B.A., University of Oxford, UK English Literature and Language
Research interests
Nineteenth Century British literature, Disability Studies
Research and teaching interests
Disability Studies, Romantic-era and Victorian British Literature, Myth and Folklore
Biography
Essaka Joshua, PhD, FSA, is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. She specializes in the literary and cultural perceptions of disability of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Joshua is the author of four monographs: Disability and the Gothic: The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2026), Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020), The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (Ashgate, 2007), and Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Ashgate, 2001). Professor Joshua is currently working on a biography of Harvey Leach (1801-1847), a monograph on disability in Romantic Theatre, and is the general editor of the forthcoming four-volume series, The Oxford Handbooks of Disability and Literatures in English: 700-Present.
Name pronunciation: es-AH-kuh
Representative publications
- Disability and the Gothic: The Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2026. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/disability-and-the-gothic/E048A41409E7C4D732EC19EC13BA82AF
- Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/physical-disability-in-british-romantic-literature/E4D5DAAF624CEE08E4203ABA03915D0C
- “Disability and the Great Tragedian: Kemble, Kean and Richard III” in An Alternative History of Shakespearean Acting: Contexts, Practices and Cultural Authority, ed. Sally Barnden, Emer McHugh, and Miranda Fay Thomas. Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Academic 2027, pp.187-211.
- "‘An Infectious Madness’: Disability and the Epidemiology of Social Unrest in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.” In Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s. Ed. John Gardner and David Stewart. Cambridge University Press, 2024. 38-61.
