Tita Chico

Tita Chico is a scholar and teacher of British literature of the long eighteenth century.

Professor Chico’s current book project, Devices of Enlightenment: A Literary History of Technology, argues that 17th- and 18th-century devices—physical and conceptual objects in literature and science—present a pressing opportunity to understand the comingling of Enlightenment technological and imaginative practice. Drawing on the definition of a device as both a “design” and a “scheme formed; project; speculation,” I argue that the concept of “device” has an important technological and literary history in the long 18th century (c. 1660-1800), one that also imagines its own future. A device is at once an object and a process with a duration; as such, a device facilitates distinctions constitutive of intellectual, cultural, and social value. The tired and, frankly, misleading binary of objective and subjective, technological and literary limits our understanding of how knowledge emerges and circulates, whether in the past or now. Devices of Enlightenment challenges this disciplinary divide by showing the mutually constitutive logics of early technology and literature embedded in the concept of the device.

On Wonder: Literature and Science in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press), Professor Chico’s most recent book, studies the long eighteenth century textual landscape populated by wonders and by wondering: one encounters seemingly countless objects of wonder and just as many experiences of wonder. These texts take up wonder as a noun and a verb, as an object and feeling, as an experience both emotional and intellectual. They also imagine wonder in relation to emergent notions of scientific practice and accounts of the natural world writ large. There are accounts of groaning trees; individuals who lived to upwards of 140 years; a “Tartar Lamb,” or a “Vegetable Lamb,” part animal, part vegetable; the moon bleeding; a tiny bird with a warble that shakes a gazebo; an insect that lives three years but also lives one day; a white Dutch boy with legible Latin and Hebrew inscribed in his eyes; a white Devonshire woman whose legs self-amputate; an enslaved Black African man in the Middle Passage seeing an expansive, magical world through a quadrant immediately before reaching the horrific human marketplace of Barbados. While the specifics may differ in tenor and tone, inquiry and conclusion, these texts reveal the power and interest that wonder as a concept conveyed in the British long eighteenth century. These are all objects that provoke wonder in those who witness or learn about them; they generate a desire for narrative and explanation; and they invite us to see differently and to imagine a world otherwise.

Challenging the “two cultures” debate, Professor Chico’s The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2018) tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. She shows that early science relied on what she terms “literary knowledge” to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, “literary knowledge” challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.

Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Bucknell, 2005; reissued 2023), Chico’s first book, draws upon extensive archival research to argue that the dressing room, introduced into English domestic architecture during the seventeenth century, embodies contradictory connotations, for it is linked to the eroticism and theatricality of the playhouse tiring-room as well as to the learning and privilege of the gentleman's closet. As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, Designing Women clearly establishes the dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature as redefining the gendered constitution of private spaces, and offers a corrective to our literary history of generic influence and development between satire and the novel: once the satirist shows the way into the lady's dressing room, the eighteenth-century novelist never stops looking. With Toni Bowers (University of Pennsylvania), Chico edited Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment, a collection of original essays that demonstrate how imaginative writing served urgent social, credal, and ideological imperatives across locations and among persons radically and unalterably redefined by their relations to the Atlantic. Tales of sexual coercion (“seduction”) and intense feeling (“sentiment”) were intimately co-mingled. Since 2021, Chico has been Editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

Professor Chico has received various grants and fellowships to support her work, including the Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professorship (UK); Senior Global Fellowship at St. Andrews University (UK); Visiting Fellowship to New College, University of Oxford; the Senior Research Fellowship, Queen Mary Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies (London); Visiting Fellowship, Chawton House Library and Research Centre (UK); Visiting Research Fellowship, Institute of English Studies at the School for Advanced Study, University of London (UK); the ASECS / The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship, Harry Ransom Center; the Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship; and the Ford Foundation Scholarship. Twice, she has been honored with the Kandice Chuh Mentorship Award. She has also been named a Maryland Research Excellence Honoree and a recipient of the Faculty Service Award.

On campus, she has served as Faculty Director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, Associate Director of Graduate Studies, Director of Placement, Faculty Director of the Theory Certificate Program, and Associate Dean of the Graduate School. Professor Chico is a member of the ASECS executive board.