Dustin D. Stewart
Research Interests
Restoration and 18th Century, Renaissance / Early Modern, Europe, American and the Americas, Poetry and Poetics, Prose Fiction/ History of the Novel, Philosophy, Aesthetics, History of Ideas, and Sociology of Knowledge
Biography
Dustin D. Stewart (PhD Texas) specializes in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century in Britain and its empire, with broader interests in poetry, in religious writing, and in the history of literary criticism. 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 in the process of transforming it. He has been particularly interested in how religion shapes modern understandings of matter, 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 published essays, on birds and belonging in Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, is drawn from a book project tentatively titled "The Parish and the Planet" and under contract with Yale University Press.
