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, Performing Liberties: a Series of Adventures through Empire, Nation, and Liberation, 1660-1832, examines the contested, evolving conception of liberty as it appeared on the English stage in the long eighteenth century. The monograph is organized under three conceptual categories—imperialism, nationalism, and liberation—that informed and were informed by the multifaceted discussion about the nature and scope of individual and social liberty.

Recent Professional Achievements

• “The Black Legend: liberalism, natural right, and British abolitionism,” The Black Legend of Spain and its Atlantic Empire in the Eighteenth Century: National Identities Under Construction, ed. Catherine Jaffe & Karen Stolley, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 2024.
• “The Seven Years’ War and Garrick’s Shakespearean Nationalism,” Shakespeare at War: A Material History, ed. Amy Lidster & Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2023.
• “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).