Katherine Mannheimer’s research and teaching interests center on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, particularly in relation to questions of print culture and the history of the book; visuality and visual culture; gender; literary theory; and law in literature.
Her dissertation, entitled “‘The Scope in Ev’ry Page’: Eighteenth-Century Satire as a Mode of Vision,” argued that visuality—both imagistic and typographic—lay at the heart of much of Britain’s Augustan-age satire, particularly that of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. She contended that, as eighteenth-century science and culture came to privilege an increasingly visual mode of experience, Pope and Swift used ekphrastic description, plot (portraying characters’ acts of looking), and experimental page-design, in order both to participate in, and to explore the limitations of, an ocularcentric epistemology. The implications of their satiric project extended to issues of gender, the task of the satirist, and the "ethics" of the eye.
The work of expanding her dissertation has led her to new areas of pursuit, as she has begun to examine eighteenth-century theatre and performance (as forms of visuality in competition with, or perhaps complementing, verbal imagery and typography). She is thus currently writing about a number of plays and poems that thematize or enact the relationship between print and performance.
