Biography
Dustin D. Stewart (PhD Texas) 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 uneven transition to modernity but didn't. He's curious, that is, about how traditions endure through change, how the new carries forward the old. His critical approach tends to be postsecular, and his writing has been especially attuned to religion's adaptable relationship to understandings of matter, embodiment, land, 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 publications, on birds and belonging in Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, is drawn from a new book project titled "The Parish and the Planet" and under contract with Yale University Press.
