Visiting Speaker: Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton)

Nigel Smith is currently Chair of the Renaissance Studies Committee at Princeton, to which he came from the University of Oxford, England, in 1999. He has published mostly on early modern literature, especially the seventeenth century; his work is interdisciplinary by inclination and training. His interests have included poetry; poetic theory; the social role of literature; literature, politics and religion; literature and visual art; heresy and heterodoxy; radical literature; early prose fiction; women’s writing; journalism; censorship; the early modern public sphere; travel; the history of linguistic ideas. The authors he has covered include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Marvell. New work involves the comparison of English with literatures in other European and some oriental vernaculars in the context of political and scientific transformation between 1500 and 1800, notably as authors and texts migrated from one place to another often in order to escape persecution. His major works are the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell’s Poems, a TLS ‘Book of the Year’ for 2003, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale UP, 1994) and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford UP, 1989). He has also edited the Journal of George Fox (1998), and the Ranter pamphlets (1983). A biography of Marvell, a study of Milton’s poetry and prose, and (with Nicholas McDowell) an extensive anthology of 17th-century radical literature, are forthcoming. He is a Senior Behrman Fellow at Princeton, has been the recipient of British Academy and NEH Research Awards, and was the British Academy Chatterton Lecturer for 1998. He gave the inaugural senior lecture at the Nicholson Center for British Studies, University of Chicago, 2004, an Anniversary Seminar at the Center for Editing Lives and Letters at the University of London in 2003, and has been active in radio and TV broadcasting in the UK and the US since 1989. He is Princeton’s representative at the Folger Shakespeare Library Institute.


We are delighted to announce that this week's distinguished guest speaker is Professor Nigel Smith. He will bepresenting a paper on Milton and Shakespeare. The seminar will takeplace at 5.15 pm on Wednesday January 21st in room 0.09 Aras an Phiarsaigh.