Kelly Fleming specializes in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century (1660–1820), with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of literature, material culture, law, politics, and empire. Her book project, Ornaments of Influence: Fashion Accessories and the Work of Politics in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (under advanced contract with UVa Press), is a literary history of structural sexism. Reading politics and literature through the trope of metonymy, it explores how literary representations of women’s accessories record their simultaneous exclusion from political institutions and inclusion in political culture in Britain and Ireland from 1660 to 1832.

Degrees

2019 — Doctor of Philosophy from University of Virginia

2013 — Master of Arts from Boston College

2011 — Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emerson College

Selected Awards & Fellowships

Monticello College Foundation & Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Newberry Library, 2020–2021.

The Lewis Walpole Library/ASECS Library Fellowship, 2018.

The Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies, 2013.

Publications

 “Helen Maria Williams on Militancy: Women’s Anger and Political Change in Letters from France (1790, 1796),” Literature Compass 22 no. 2 (June 2025):1–9.

“Material Culture” in Jonathan Swift in Context, eds. Joseph Hone and Pat Rogers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024)

“Lady Delacour’s Electioneering Rage,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 42 no. 1 (Spring 2023):35–65.

“The Politics of Sophia Western’s Muff,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31 no.4 (Summer 2019): 659–684.

“The Things of Masquerade in Frances Burney’s Cecilia and The Wanderer,” The Burney Journal 14 (2017): 24–40.