California Institute of Technology

Faculty Member, Humanities and Social Sciences

Professor of English Literature

About

So far, I've written primarily about the history of humanistic study, reading, and interpretation in England and Europe between 1500 and 1800.  My first book, 'Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment' (Harvard, 2011), holds up to a sometimes unforgiving light the most celebrated classical scholar of the eighteenth century.  If Bentley was a fully paid-up Latin-speaking member of the international Republic of Letters, why did he also desire so deeply to leave his mark on England's polite vernacular literary culture?  And how did he form his serious scholarship in response to what he thought were the demands of his age?  The answers show us, among other things, how hard it could be for the Enlightenment to set itself apart from the Renaissance; Bentley was haunted by his ancestors even as he was fatally captivated by his more fashionable contemporaries.

My current book project on 'Intellectuals in Prison from Marco Polo to Nelson Mandela' also devotes very careful attention to early modern Europe.  During this period, elites and specifically intellectuals were regularly imprisoned by absolute monarchs and hardened republican regimes, and with remarkable frequency, these learned inmates managed to write substantial works of scholarship, philosophy, and poetry while confined. Some prisoners radically changed their scholarly habits as the result of privation; others, somewhat improbably, proceeded as if nothing had altered; and some seem to have taken imprisonment as an occasion for wholesale reassessment and surprising intellectual change. I carry this story forward through the eventual decline in the imprisonment of elites in Europe, the simultaneous rise of public articulation of human rights and the freedom of expression, and the new social identification of the prison in the West as an institution for the criminal and the unwashed. On an even more general plane, the story of intellectuals in prison forms a remarkable case study for the interaction of individuals, institutions, and durable social habits and identities. I welcome suggestions from anyone about early modern prisoners I may have missed so far.