Kevin Pask, PhD

Current research includes a book-length study of the emergence of the English and French literary publics in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in comparison with other historical formations of literary culture.

Another substantial research project is a study of the fate of nationalism in the twenty-first century, including case studies of Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.  

Education

BA Yale University, 1983
PhD Johns Hopkins University, 1993

Research and teaching interests

Renaissance literature
Shakespeare
History of the literary public in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Nationalism and the development of national literatures
Literary biography and life writing
Fairy and folk tales; the history of fantasy
Texas cultural history

Grants / Research projects

Books

The Fairy Way of Writing: Shakespeare to Tolkien (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)

The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Articles

My recent articles in early modern literary studies include:
    •    "Town and Country: The Geography of the English Literary Public," in Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy, Joseph Ward and Angela Vanhaelen, editors (Routledge, 2013)
    •    "Ancients and Moderns: The Origins of Literary History," Modern Language Quarterly 73:4 (2012), 505-526
    •    “The Bourgeois Public Sphere and the Concept of Literature,” Criticism 46 (2004), 241-256
    •    “Caliban’s Masque,” ELH (English Literary History) 70 (2003), 739-756

I have also published on recent varieties of nationalism, in the context of the longer history of nationalism, and essays on the political and cultural history of Texas:
    •    "Mosaics of American Nationalism," New Left Review 88 (July-August 2014), 69-87
    •    “Deep Ellum Blues,” Southern Spaces (2007)
    •    “God’s Casino: The Texas of George W. Bush,” Dissent (Summer 2006), 37-44
    •    “Late Nationalism: The Case of Québec,” New Left Review 11 (Sept.-Oct. 2001), 33-54