Abigail Zitin

Abigail Zitin is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Rutgers University’s School of Arts and Sciences. She is based at the College Ave Campus in Murray Hall, Room 205C. Her research focuses on 18th-century British literature, aesthetics, and visual culture, with a particular interest in William Hogarth’s theories of art and beauty. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. degrees from Cambridge University (English) and Columbia University (Women’s and Gender Studies).

Her major work, Practical Form (Yale University Press, 2020), rethinks the concept of form in 18th-century aesthetics by examining intersections between craft, skill, and gender. She also explores the cultural history of addiction as a lens for understanding agency and the rise of the novel. Her article Thinking Like an Artist (2013) analyzes Hogarth and Diderot’s contributions to aesthetic theory.

Zitin teaches undergraduate courses on 18th-century poetry, fiction, and addiction, as well as graduate courses on taste and judgment in literature. She is affiliated with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.