Nancy Cervetti joined the Avila faculty in 1993 after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.  She specializes in British literature and feminist theory and teaches courses in Women and Literature, Darwin and Literature, Images and Realities of Women, and Introduction to Literary Criticism.

For over ten years, S. Weir Mitchell has been the focus of Dr. Cervetti’s research.   Mitchell, a seminal figure in American medicine and literature, is both interesting in his own right and in the wider sociopolitical inquiry into the nineteenth century.  While scholars often focus on his rest cure, Mitchell’s research with venomous snakes laid the foundation for subsequent research in toxicology and immunology, and his Civil War work with gunshot wounds and phantom limbs was internationally recognized.  In the 1880s he began to devote half of each year to literary pursuits, and between 1884 and his death in 1914 he published thirteen novels and several books of poetry.  Dr. Cervetti is currently writing a biography of Mitchell, focusing on his experimental medicine, neurology, literature, and civic contributions.  

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Recent Publications
“S. Weir Mitchell and His Snakes: Myth, Metaphor and Experimental Medicine.” Journal of Medical Humanities.  28.3 (2007): 119-133.
"S. Weir Mitchell Representing 'a hell of pain': From Civil War to Rest Cure."  Arizona Quarterly. 59.3(2003): 69-96.
"S. Weir Mitchell: The Early Years."  American Pain Society Bulletin.  13.2(2003): 7-9, 19.
 “Faith, Religion, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel.”   Victorian Literary Cultures: A Critical Companion to the Nineteenth-Century Novel.   Ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack.  Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
“A Nineteenth-Century Literary Physician: S. Weir Mitchell ’s Medical Work and Imaginative Writing. ”  Transactions & Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia XIX (1997): 95-109.
Scenes of Reading: Transforming Romance in Brontë, Eliot and Woolf.  New York:Peter Lang, 1997.
"In the Breeches, Petticoats, and Laughter of Orlando."  Journal of Modern Literature XX (1997): 56-84.
"Mr. Dagley's Midnight Darkness: Uncovering the German Connection in George Eliot's Fiction."  George Eliot and Europe.Ed. John Rignall.  Great Britain: Scolar Press, 1996.
"The Resurrection of Milly Barton: At the Nexus of Production, Text and Re-Production.” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21.3 (1992): 339-359.
"Dickens and Eliot in Dialogue: Empty Space, Angels and Maggie Tulliver." The Victorian Newsletter Fall (1991):18-23.

Honors
Resident Scholar, Schlesinger Library Summer Seminar on Gender History, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, June 2007
 
Year-long Sabbaticals, Avila University, 2000-2001, 2007-2008

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality / National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2001

Wood Fellowships, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 2000, 1996

Visiting Scholar, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University, 1994