Rebekah Mitsein
Associate Professor; Assistant Chair
Biography
Rebekah Mitsein's research and teaching interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and transatlantic literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on how the era's global crossroads influenced European texts and thought. She is the author of African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (University of Virginia Press), which won the 2022 Walker Cowen Memorial Book Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies and was shortlisted for the 2023 Kenshur Prize for the best book in eighteenth-century studies. She is currently working on two research projects. One, The True Story of the Abyssinian Liar , is a biography of the traveler James Bruce and the Ethiopian noblewomen who authorized his entrée into the eighteenth-century court at Gondar. The other, Gold Coast Metaphysics and the Matter of Spirit , argues for the influence of African cosmologies on Enlightenment thought.