Associate Professor

Ph.D., Duke University, 1987

Barbara Laning Fitzpatrick graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in 1972 with a B.A. in Biology. She holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of South Alabama and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Duke University. She began teaching in the UNO English Department in 1989.

Professor Fitzpatrick’s doctoral dissertation was a study of the text and publishing history of an eighteenth-century English novel, Tobias Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves. She served as textual editor for a scholarly edition of that novel (2002) while also pursuing research in eighteenth-century British book trade history. She participated in an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers in London in 1992, and in 2003 received the Bibliographical Society of America's Mitchell Prize for an article on eighteenth-century London periodicals publishing. Since then, she has written new book trade biographies for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Recently she has been working on Smollett attributions, the nineteenth-century American bookselling and publishing business of S. H. Goetzel, and the moral basis of the fiction of Jane Austen and Somerville and Ross.

Professor Fitzpatrick’s teaching areas are Eighteenth-Century British Literature, The Novel, Irish Fiction, Book and Periodical History, Textual Bibliography, and Technical Writing. She has taught at every level, from freshman through graduate, and has looked to the future with the development of online versions of seven of her classroom courses—Survey of British Literature I, Later Eighteenth-Century Literature, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, Irish Fiction, Introduction to Graduate Studies in English, The Novel of Sensibility and the Gothic, and Jane Austen. She enjoys introducing students of all levels to British Literature and initiating graduate students into the dual callings of teaching and research. She welcomes the aid of graduate assistants in her historical work.

Outside the classroom and the archives, Dr. Fitzpatrick travels, gardens, and reads. She collects old books and visits American Civil War battlefields. With a friend or two and her iPhone for company, she rummages through old bookshops and walks battlefields, often on the same trip.