Dr. Deborah Needleman Armintor

Deborah Needleman Armintor (PhD Rice University, 2002) is the author of From Dwarfs to Little Men: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (forthcoming from University of Washington Press as part of their interdisciplinary Literary Conjugations series), a study of the prominence of male dwarfs and other little men in literature, art, science, and popular culture of the 1700s as an indicator of early-modern conceptions of masculinity.  Her edited volume, Eighteenth-Century British Erotica II.2 (Pickering and Chatto, 2004), is part of the first large-scale collection of eighteenth-century erotic texts with scholarly commentary and notes.

Dr. Armintor’s articles on eighteenth-century British literature and gender/sexuality studies have appeared in the journals SEL (Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900), ECTI (The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation), 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, and Literature and Psychology.  At the 2007 MLA convention her article on “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag” was awarded the Monroe Kirk Spears Award for the SEL essay most “marked by clarity, economy, and felicity of expression and by elegant and discerning interpretation” and considered by the editors “the greatest pleasure to read.”  The article was later reprinted in its entirety by Harold Bloom in his Modern Critical Views/Modern Critical Interpretations series edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 2008. 

Having completed From Dwarfs to Little Men while raising two young children and teaching a variety of new courses in English literature, gender/sexuality studies, women’s studies, and Jewish studies (for which she was interviewed by Andrea O’Reilly of ARM: The Association for Research on Mothering for her forthcoming book on mothering and academia), she is now at work on two new projects, “Wife and Servant Are the Same”: Domestic Servitude as Same-Sex Marriage in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, a study of master/servant relationships depicted as homoerotically spousal (with the help of a 2009-2010 UNT undergraduate research assistant grant), and The Socioeconomics of Accidental Incest in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, an analysis of accidental incest situations as critiques of the middle-class myth of social ascendancy. 

Dr. Armintor welcomes all comments and inquiries about her research and teaching.  She can be reached at dna@unt.edu.

Office: Language Building, Room 408E
Phone: 940.369.8948