Dr. Zoe Beenstock

Senior Lecturer, MA Committee Chair

Office: Floor 16, Room 1610, Eshkol Tower.

Office hours: Tuesdays 12:00 – 13:00, or by appointment (Fall Semester).

Internal: 58308

Scientific biography: I specialize in British Romanticism and in eighteenth-century literature, political theory, and culture. The first years my career were spent exploring the relationship between Romanticism and social contract philosophy, which culminated in the book The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature (2016). I then researched the relationship between Romantic aesthetics and political theory through articles on the lyric, fictionality, disability studies, and gender. My current project, A New Sacred Geography: Imagining Biblical Antiquarian History in British Romantic Literature, 1764-1815. I am studying a corpus of unrecognized histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about the migration to Britain of ancient peoples from Palestine, Syria and the biblical region, relating them to Romantic notions of Britain and the orient.

Fields of Research & Instruction (keywords): Romanticism, poetry, eighteenth century, political theory, Palestine, orientalism, social contract theory, Enlightenment, disability studies.

Publications:

Monograph:

Beenstock, Zoe. The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature. Edinburgh Critical Series in Romanticism, Edinburgh University Press. April 2016. Paperback August 2017. Digital format 2017. 228 pages.

Beenstock, Zoe. “Jerusalem Moves West: Undoing Biblical Chronology in Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem.” European Romantic Review 64.5 (October, 2023): 609-627.

Beenstock, Zoe. “Palestine as Europe’s Future: Antiquity as Contemporaneity in Volney’s Travels, Considerations, and The Ruins.” Studies in Romanticism 62. 2 (July 2023): 269–82.

Beenstock, Zoe. “How Samuel Taylor Coleridge Suspended Henry Fielding’s Disbelief,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 60.4 (October 2020), 673-92

Beenstock, Zoe. “Reforming Utilitarianism: Lyric Poetry in J. S. Mill’s “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties.” Journal of the History of Ideas 81.4 (November 2020), 599-620

Beenstock, Zoe. “Looking at Sympathy in Wordsworth’s Disability Poetry.” Romanticism: The Journal of Culture and Criticism 26.1 (April 2020): 62-74

Beenstock, Zoe. “Lyrical Sociability: The Social Contract and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Philosophy and Literature (October 2015) 39:2, 406-22.

Beenstock, Zoe. “Empiricist Political Theory and the Modern Novel: The Social Contract and H. G. Wells.” Modern Language Quarterly (March 2015) 76:1, 57-77

Beenstock, Zoe. “Romantic Individuals and the Social Contract: The Prelude and Rousseau.” European Romantic Review 23.2 (March 2012) 157-75

Edited Journal Issues:

Beenstock, Zoe and Zur Shalev, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, “Levant Antiquarianism in European History and Literature (1500-1850),” forthcoming 2025.

Beenstock, Zoe and Benziman, Galia. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, “Mapping Victorian Empires, Cultures, Identities.” Johns Hopkins University Press. 19.2 (June 2021), 201-390.

Honors, Grants, And Fellowships:

2021- 2025 – Israel Science Foundation Personal Grant: “A New Sacred Geography: Imagining Biblical Antiquarian History in British Romantic Literature, 1764-1815”

2023 – Peter Spang III Fellow, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

2022 – Huntington Library Fellowship

2019 – Yale Center for British Art Visiting Scholar Fellowship

2015 – Humboldt Foundation Connect Fellowship

2014 – 2015 – Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow, Ben-Gurion University

2011 – 2013 – Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellow, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Personal website:
https://haifa.academia.edu/ZoeBeenstock

Courses: Amatory Fiction, Gothic Families, Introduction to Criticism and Theory, Introduction to Disability Studies, Islands: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Lost in the Labyrinth: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century London, Narratives of Travel to the Levant: Gender and Genre, Romantic Poetry, Survey II of British Literature: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, The Romantic Self, Unbecoming a Woman: Early Feminism, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Writing Childhood