Literature, Politics and Religion in the Dutch Republic: 'True Freedom' and an Anglo-Dutch perspective

CREMS Postgraduate Workshop, led by Professor Nigel Smith, Princeton University

Nigel Smith (D. Phil., Oxford University) is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Books and media at Princeton University. He has published mostly on early modern literature, especially the seventeenth century. His interests include poetry; poetic theory; the social role of literature; literature, politics and religion; literature and visual art; heresy and heterodoxy; radical literature; early prose fiction; women’s writing; journalism; censorship; the early modern public sphere; travel; the history of linguistic ideas. The authors he has covered include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Marvell. New work involves comparison of English with literatures in other European and vernacular languages in the context of political and scientific transformation between 1500 and 1800, notably as authors and texts migrated from one place to another often in order to escape persecution. His works include the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell’s Poems, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660, and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640-1660. He has also edited the Journal of George Fox, the Ranter pamphlets, and, with Nicholas McDowell, The Oxford Handbook of Milton Studies. His biography Robert Marvell - The Chameleon was published in March 2012. He is a Senior Behrman Fellow at Princeton, has been the recipient of British Academy and NEH Research Awards, and was the British Academy Chatterton Lecturer for 1998.