CATHERINE HELEN DECKER
Chaffey College
English Department
5885 Haven Avenue
Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91737
909/941-2412
cathy.decker@chaffey.edu

Brief Biography:
Cathy Decker graduated summa cum laude from La Salle University, Philadelphia, with a BA in English. She then attended the University of Rochester, New York, where she got a MA in English literature and a Ph.D. in British eighteenth-century literature and the novel. Cathy taught part-time in New York, Alabama, and California before being hired in the English Department of Chaffey College. She has designed webpages for the UC Riverside Psychology and Neuroscience Departments, as well as for Chaffey's English Department.

Public Lecture Topics:

  • "The Extension of Reason to Women: Late Eighteenth-Century British Women Novelists' Ambiguous Acceptance of Female Rationality," San Bernardio
  • "Dueling Moral Codes in British Women\'s Novels (1778-1814)," South Bend, Indiana
  • "Ethics, Gender, and Public Space: Learning from the Novels of the 1790s," San Bernardino
  • "Jane Austen and the Regency Lady," Pasadena
  • "Female Self-Treatment: Preventive Medical Regimes, Piety, and the Novels of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Elizabeth Helme," Tuscon, Arizona
  • "'Inhumane Laws': the Promotion of Legal Separation in Late Eighteenth-Century Women's Novels," Salt Lake City, Utah
  • "Women on the Streets: Prostitutes, Lunatics, and Transgressive Heroines in Late Eighteenth- Century Literature," Irvine
  • "United in Sickness, Not in Health: Female Bonding in the Sickroom in Late Eighteenth- Century Women's Novels," San Marcos
  • "Who is Daniel Deronda?" Hartford, Connecticut
  • "'Eloisa to Abelard': A Mystical Approach" Amherst, Massachusetts
  • "Wilde, Decadence, and Late Victorian Comedy," Toronto, Canada
  • "Generations in Dialogue: A Structural Model of the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel," Worchester, Massachusetts
  • "Women, Evil, and Art: Rhetorical Strategies in Thomson's Seasons," Rochester, New York
  • "'Wulf and Eadwacer': Two Names, One Man," Rochester, New York

Publications:

  • "Women and Public Space in the Novel of the 1790s," Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, in press
  • "Crossing Old Barriers: The WorldWideWeb, Academia, and the Romantic Novel," Romanticism On the Net (May 1998)

Recommendations:

Website: hal.ucr.edu/~cathy

Catherine Decker has been listed in the Directory of California Thinkers since 31-Jan-2000.