Carrie Shanafelt

Carrie Shanafelt is a Lecturer in English at Yeshiva University, specializing in interdisciplinary scholarship on 18th-century British and American literature, philosophy, and legal theory. Her work focuses on intersections of ethics, gender, sexuality, slavery, and aesthetics, with particular emphasis on Jeremy Bentham and abolitionist thinkers like Ottobah Cugoano. She serves as Philosophy Reviews Editor for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Dr. Shanafelt holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center (2011), an M.A. in English (2003), and a B.A. in Spanish and English (2001), both from Case Western Reserve University. Her research bridges literary analysis with philosophical inquiry, addressing topics such as queer aesthetics, financial speculation in colonial contexts, and moral philosophy's relationship to legal systems.

Her publications include the monograph Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (2022), peer-reviewed articles exploring slavery and debt in Enlightenment thought, and book chapters on Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Recent work examines Cugoano's critique of British slavery and financial systems. She regularly reviews scholarly works in eighteenth-century studies and queer theory for academic journals.

Though primarily focused on research and teaching, her work engages with contemporary debates on legal reform and queer theory through an eighteenth-century lens. No lab or collaborative research teams are explicitly mentioned in her profile.