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 drama as an idea and a series of practices, both theatrical and literary; 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.

In 2017, he published Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, a critical re-evaluation of the most famous play of all. It was a Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2018. His new book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, builds on his account of Hamlet to offer a powerfully original reassessment of Shakespearean tragedy in the round—of what drew Shakespeare toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter. At the moment, he is at work on a life of the great literary critic Frank Kermode, whose papers are now housed in the Firestone Library; once done with that, he’ll be returning to the early modern world. 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, The Literary Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Lewis will be interviewed by Donna Denizé,

Of Haitian American descent, Donna Denizé holds a B.A. from Stonehill College and an M.A in Renaissance drama from Howard University, where she was also a student of poet Robert Hayden, while he served as Consultant to the Library of Congress. She is currently earning her second Master’s, this time an MFA in poetry. She has contributed to scholarly books and journals, most recently an article on the sonnet and Claude McKay in the anthology, The American Sonnet(University of Iowa Press, 2022), and she is the author of a chapbook, The Lover’s Voice (1997) and a book, Broken Like Job (2005). She currently Chairs the English Department at St. Albans School for boys, where she teaches Freshman English, a junior/senior elective in Shakespeare, and Crossroads in American Identity, a course she designed years ago and which affords her the opportunity to do what she most enjoys—exploring not only the cultural and inter-textual crossroads of literary works but also their points of human unity.

Rhodri’s talk will be followed by a Q+A segment as well as a book signing. Barnswallow will have copies of his work for sale.