Dustin D. Stewart

Dustin D. Stewart

Research Interests

Biography

Dustin D. Stewart (PhD Texas), an untenured associate professor, specializes in the literature and culture of the eighteenth century in Britain and its empire, with broader interests in poetry and poetics and in religious writing. His teaching and scholarship emphasize strange persistences: ideas, practices, and styles that might have died off in the transition to modernity but didn't. His critical approach tends to be postsecular, reconsidering the period and its ambitions through different conceptual frameworks for religion, and he's particularly interested in alternatives to traditional scholarly accounts of materialism, embodiment, and place. Futures of Enlightenment Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2020) won the Louis Gottschalk Prize for best book on an eighteenth-century subject. Recent articles have appeared in the journals ELH, New Literary History, and Representations. One of those essays, on birds and belonging in Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, is drawn from a new book project tentatively titled "The Parish and the Planet." Transatlantic in scope, the study examines writers who think about the Anglican parish as a flexible social and ecological space and as a foundation for identity.

Selected Publications