Deutsch, Helen E.
Kaplan 248
Fax: 310.267.4339
/ E-mail
Education
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1990
Interests
Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Disability Studies, Health Humanities, Poetry, Gender Studies, Literary Theory, Classical Literature in/and Translation
Selected Works
Books:
The Last Amateur: Jonathan Swift, Edward Said, and the Profession of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2026)
Loving Dr. Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Harvard University Press, 1996)
Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death (University of Toronto Press, 2012) (co-edited with Mary Terrall)
“Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body (University of Michigan Press, 2000) (co-edited with Felicity Nussbaum)
Selected Essays:
“This long Disease, my Life: Alexander Pope, Poetry, and Patient-hood.” In Cynthia D. Richards and Lilith Todd, eds., Literature as Clinic: Patient Narratives of the Eighteenth Century. University of Delaware Press, forthcoming.
“Health and Sickness.” In Joseph Hone and Pat Rogers, eds. Jonathan Swift in Context, pp. 18-24. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
“We Must Keep Moving.” The Rambling, 7 August 2020, https://the-rambling.com/2020/08/07/issue9-deutsch/
“Oranges, anecdote and the nature of things.” SubStance 38, no. 1 (2009): 31-55.
Additional Information
Helen Deutsch’s work is fueled by the love of literature and the love of authors. She practices a unique kind of feminist historical formalism that reads texts in relationship to the embodied lives of the writers who produced them. Her first two books consider the singular bodies of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson in symbiotic relationship to each author’s uniquely imitative literary style and contested critical reception. She remains a proud Johnsonian, and will never run out of things to say about her favorite poet, Pope, whom Johnson trenchantly called a “good hater.”
Her most recent book, The Last Amateur, goes beyond the single-author framework to consider what it means to learn to love one author through another, and to be transformed in the process. Deutsch scrutinizes Edward Said in relationship to Jonathan Swift to raise questions of her own about the profession of literary studies. At a time when many in the field have lost faith in critique, she shows how passion and a refusal of professional propriety—the hallmarks of the amateur—can enliven critique again.
Deutsch first came to UCLA in 1992 as an Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow under the auspices of UCLA’s Center for 17th– & 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Her career came full circle when she served as Director of the Center/Clark for a four-year term from 2017-2020.
An NEH fellow in residence at the Huntington Library in the academic year 1998-9, and an ACLS fellow in 2016, Deutsch has served on the MLA Executive Committee of the Division of Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Literature, as a Member at Large on the board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and as a member of the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession; in addition she has been an advisory editor for PMLA and a member of the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Deutsch led a successful effort to found UCLA’s Disability Studies minor (now the first major of its kind at any California public university), and served as its first chair from 2006-11. She is currently UCLA’s co-PI, with Rachel Lee, for the five-campus research initiative, “Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice: Mapping Inequity and Renewing the Social.” Her contribution has focused on the complex relationship between “Archive and Theory” in Disability Studies, an ongoing collaborative inquiry which began with this conference at the Clark in 2022: https://www.1718.ucla.edu/events/archive-and-theory-2/
Interest Areas
• Disability Studies
• Eighteenth-C. British Literature
• Critical Theory
• Sexuality & Gender Studies
