Rachel Carnell

Dean of the Mandel Honors College and Mandel Chair in Humanities at Cleveland State University,

Rachel Carnell is Dean of the Mandel Honors College and Mandel Chair in Humanities at Cleveland State University, where she is also professor of eighteenth-century British literature, with an expertise on the intersection between partisan politics and literary history.

Her first book, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (2006), established a link between partisan discourse and the tropes of narrative realism in early eighteenth-century novels.

In researching the links between literature and politics, she became an expert on political secret history and is co-editor, with Rebecca Bullard, of The Secret History and Literature, 1660-1820 (Cambridge 2017).

Her subsequent books connect political and literary history to current events, particularly Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne (2020) and Stewardship and the Future of the Planet (2023).

She holds a PhD in English literature from Boston University.