Samara Anne Cahill

Professor Samara Cahill joined the faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences school in 2009. Dr. Cahill graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2009 with a PhD in eighteenth-century English and a graduate minor (concentration) in Gender Studies. During her time at Notre Dame she received several academic awards, including a Presidential Fellowship, a Gender Studies Pre-doctoral Fellowship, and a Dissertation Year Fellowship. She was awarded 1st place in the 2008 Notre Dame Graduate Research Symposium, Humanities Division. As a National Merit Scholar she earned her dual B.A from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001, graduating with High Honors in Plan II (the university’s honors Liberal Arts program) and Special Honors in English.

Research Interests

Professor Cahill’s area of expertise is literature written in England during the “long” eighteenth century (1660-1800). She focuses particularly on representations of women and the centrality of religion, education, and the concept of immortality to women’s representations of themselves. Currently, she is researching the relationship between proto-feminism, “feminist orientalism,” and Anglo-Ottoman representational strategies. More broadly, she is interested in proto-feminism and its relation to the Renaissance querelle des femmes; women writers and women’s education; Anglo-Ottoman relations and representations; and representations of Catholics, Jacobites, and marginalized religio-political “others.”