Our faculty specialize in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660-1800, with particular interests in the economics of culture, print culture and the public sphere, interdisciplinary studies of various sorts (science and literature, opera, theatre architecture), and history of aesthetics and criticism. We welcome students with interests in all genres throughout the period.
Scholarly Resources at the Penn State Library
The Penn State Library provides access to Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), which includes electronic facsimilies of essentially all book and pamphlet titles published in England or in English, 1701-1800, and Gale’s Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Burney Collection Newspapers in the British Library. Our holdings of original editions in Rare Books are also astonishingly good.
Graduate Faculty
I work in drama and theatre history and opera history, 1660-1800. Most of my research is now in the economic history of culture, including drama, theatre, concerts, opera, book publication, and art history.
The history of print media and the history of reading, studies in the British empire, Enlightenment studies, and gender studies. Dissertations directed in the field include those written by Steven Thomas, Angela Vietto, and Nicholas Rombes.
Graduate Students
Conservatism and Reaction | Counter-Enlightenment | Anti-Jacobinism and Counterrevolutionary Politics
Gothic literature.