Mariam Wassif
Assistant Professor of English
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Bio
Mariam Wassif's work focuses on rhetoric, race, and material culture in the long eighteenth century and Romanticism.
Her current book project “Poisoned Vestments”: Rhetoric and Material Culture in Britain and France, 1660-1820, identifies an encounter between ancient rhetoric and commercial modernity across the canonical genres of the period, including poetry, drama, satire, and prose. She argues that rapid political, economic, and environmental change propelled major authors (Milton, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron, Austen, and Wheatley Peters) to restyle the classical trope of figurative language as the “dress” of thought. Adopting a feminist and decolonial perspective, “Poisoned Vestments” promotes our understanding of the inter-animating relationship of rhetoric and history.
In her public-facing work, she is also a for the and a co-administrator of the anti-racist pedagogy Facebook group.
She spent many years teaching in France, first at the ENS de Lyon and later as Research and Teaching fellow (2017-21) and full-time instructor (2021-22) at the University of Paris 1- Panthéon-Sorbonne.