Jonathan

Crimmins

Courses Taught

• Composition
• Introduction to Drama
• Introduction to Literature
• Survey of British Literature II
• 18th Century Literature
• British Romanticism
• Creative Writing

Research Interests

My research spans the long eighteenth century from the Restoration through British Romanticism. My first book, The Romantic Historicism to Come, argues that Romanticism marks an inflection point in the development of historicism. Romanticism’s deep commitment to teleology hobbled its historicism with seemingly inescapable dilemmas. Yet, Romanticism also contained the seeds of a more flexible conception of historicity. Focusing on futurity and historicity’s minimum conditions, The Romantic Historicism to Come reconsiders historicism using conceptual tools first articulated in the Romantic period.

My current book project, Harlequin Against History, furthers my research interest in literature’s complex relationship to historical truth. The book takes up the wildly popular but understudied eighteenth-century dramatic genre of the Harlequinade to provide an account of the period’s historical sense that is less rooted in emergent nationalisms and more amenable to the cosmopolitan and the asynchronous.

Recent Professional Achievements

• “Reconciliation in David Garrick’s Harlequin’s Invasion and Cymbeline,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 59.3 (2019).
• The Romantic Historicism to Come. Bloomsbury Press (April 2018).
• “Melville’s Gothic,” Herman Melville in Context, ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge University Press (2017).
• “Kant, Hegel, and the Minimum Conditions of Historicity,” Essays in Romanticism 21.2 (2014).
• “Mediation’s Sleight of Hand: Two Vectors of the Gothic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 52.4 (2013).
• “Gender, Genre, and the Near Future in Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Law of Genre,’” Diacritics 39.1 (2009) © 2011.
• “Nested Inversions: Genre and the Bipartite Form of Herman Melville’s Pierre,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 64.4 (2010).