Rhodri Lewis

Senior Research Scholar/Lecturer with rank of Professor

B55 McCosh Hall

(609) 258-1606

rhodri.lewis@princeton.edu

Office Hours:
Mondays 10:30am - 12:30pm and by appointment

Teaching and Research Interests:
Poetry, Poetics, and Aesthetics
Literary Theory
Eighteenth-Century Literature
Early Modern Literature
Drama and Performance Studies
British Literature


After spending 23 years at the University of Oxford as a student, faculty member, and ultimately full professor — where he was also Head of Graduate Studies for the Humanities Division and Director of Ertegun House — Rhodri Lewis moved permanently to Princeton in 2018. His interests lie principally in the literary, cultural, and intellectual histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (He is uncertain when this period begins and ends, but sometimes feels sure that it must run from at least as early as 1453 to at least late as 1761.) Related preoccupations include bibliography and textual criticism; the status of early modern English as a language informed by Latin and by other European vernaculars; the diffusion and decline of humanism as a cultural and educational ideology;?the history of science, the history of religion, and the history of political thought;?the frequently contested lines of demarcation between human and animal forms of life; the no less frequently contested status of "poetic" (and/or “literary”) language; the history of literary criticism.
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His most recent book,?Hamlet and the Vision of?Darkness, reads Shakespeare’s most famous play alongside the various orthodoxies of renaissance humanism, and offers a strikingly unfamiliar?account of the play’s action and significance. It was a Choice?“Outstanding Academic Title”?for 2018. At the moment, he is at work on two projects: a monograph provisionally titled Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, and a study of the literary critic Frank Kermode.?Looking further ahead, he is starting to think about a project examining the?transformation of “literature” from a cultural field that encompassed the?litterae humaniores?in the round, to one that would be circumscribed as?the province of?belles lettres. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from institutions including the Leverhulme Trust, the Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, the Huntington Library, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Outside?the academy, he writes for publications including?The Times Literary Supplement,?Prospect,?and?The Los Angeles Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter as?@profrhodrilewis.

Selected Publications:

Books

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)
William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise?(Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2012)
Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke, “Ideas in Context” series, no. 80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback reissue, 2012)

Articles

1.?Shakespeare
“Polychronic Macbeth”, Modern Philology 117 (2020), 323-46.
"Shakespeare, Olaus Magnus, and Monsters of the Deep", Notes and Queries?65 (2018), 76-81
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“Romans, Egyptians, and Crocodiles”, Shakespeare Quarterly 68 (2017), 320-50
“Young Hamlet”, Times Literary Supplement 5917 (2 September 2016), 15-17
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“Hamlet, Metaphor, and Memory”,?Studies in Philology?109 (2012), 609-41
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“Two Meanings in One Word: A Note on Shakespeare’s?Richard III, III.i.81-83”,?Notes and Queries?59 (2012), 61-63
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“Shakespeare’s Clouds and the Image Made by Chance”,?Essays in Criticism?62 (2012), 1-24
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2.?Bacon
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“Francis Bacon and Ingenuity”,?Renaissance Quarterly?67 (2014), 113-63
“Francis Bacon, Allegory and the Uses of Myth”,?Review of English Studies?61 (2010), 360-89
“A Kind of Sagacity: Francis Bacon, the?ars memoriae?and the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge”,?Intellectual History Review?19 (2009), 155-77
3.?Philosophy, Science and Religion
“Impartiality and Disingenuousness in English Rational Religion”, in?The Emergence of Impartiality, eds. Anita Traninger and Kathryn Murphy (Leiden, 2013), 224-45
“Thinking with Animals in the Early Royal Society”, in?Ethical Perspectives on Animals in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, eds. Burkhard Dohm and Cecilia Muratori (Florence, 2013), 231-56
“William Petty’s Anthropology: Religion, Colonialism, and the Problem of Human Diversity”,?Huntington Library Quarterly?74 (2011), 261-88
“Hooke’s Two Buckets: Memory, Mnemotechnique and Knowledge in the Early Royal Society”, in?Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, eds. Donald Beecher and Grant Williams (Toronto, 2009), 339-63
“The Enlightenment”, in?The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, eds. Andrew Hass, David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay (Oxford, 2007), 97-114
“Robert Hooke at 371”,?Perspectives on Science?14 (2007), 672-87
“Of ‘Origenian Platonisme’: Joseph Glanvill on the Pre-Existence of Souls”,?Huntington Library Quarterly?69 (2006), 267-300
4.?Language
“The Same Principle of Reason: John Wilkins and Language”, in John Wilkins (1614-1672): New Essays, ed. William Poole (Leiden, 2017), 182-98.
“On Looking Again into Champagnolla’s Homer”,?Language and History?56 (2013), 56-66
“‘The Best Mnemonicall Expedient’: John Beale’s Art of Memory and its Uses”,?The Seventeenth Century?20 (2005), 113-44
“A Babel off Broad Street: Artificial Language Planning in 1650s Oxford”,?History of Universities?19 (2005), 108-45
“John Evelyn, the Early Royal Society and Artificial Language Projection: a New Source”,?Notes and Queries?51 (2004), 31-35
“The Publication of John Wilkins’s?Essay?(1668): Some Contextual Considerations”,?Notes and Records of the Royal Society?56 (2002), 133-46
“The Efforts of the Aubrey Correspondence Group to Revise John Wilkins’s?Essay?(1668) and their context”,?Historiographia Linguistica?28 (2001), 333-66
5.?Miscellaneous
“La morte del padre: Translating Machiavelli”, Notes and Queries 64 (2017), 249-52
“Samuel Hartlib”, “William Petty” and “John Wilkins”, in?The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, eds. Alan Stewart, Garrett Sullivan, et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 446-51, 780-82, 1057-59
“Historians, Critics and Historicists”,?English Historical Review?125 (2010), 370-82
“An Early Reader of Dryden’s?Absalom and Achitophel”,?Notes and Queries?57 (2010), 67-69
“An Unpublished Letter from Andrew Marvell to William Petty”,?Notes and Queries?53 (2006), 47-50