Current Project: Recovering Philology: Knowledge and Its Progress from Bacon to Darwin

Most contemporary scholars find philology hard to define. This is because they assume we should primarily define past fields of knowledge in relation to their objects of study, and have given less attention to the purposes of philology according to writers who practised and described philology at the time. The current consensus is that philology ascended around 1800 as set of historical, comparative inquiries into texts and languages.

But that’s not the whole story. The domain of objects studied by philologists changed several times. Philology’s cohering rationale must, then, have come from something other than those objects. Philology was not chiefly about texts and languages. Those were only the means of accomplishing its purpose, which was to discover and explain how every branch of knowledge had first originated and subsequently progressed, from antiquity to the present. Philology was about the intersection of knowledge and progress.

Philology’s enquiry into knowledge’s progress first emerged in the 1620s. It took off around 1750, as the proportion of published texts mentioning ‘philology’ began a marked increase that was sustained until the 1880s. Philology addressed every kind of knowledge, its coverage extending far beyond the topics now assigned to the humanities.

It was this thematic intersection of knowledge and progress that drove philology’s turn toward languages in the late 18th century, which I show was less a philological revolution than it was a gradual modification of a pre-existing philological framework for the study of progress.

Applying insights from literary genre theory, I use new digital methods to uncover when and how philology’s meaning changed. This synthesis of genre theory and the history of knowledge is my broadest contribution to scholarship: a new theory of scholarly fields, grounded in an analysis of the dynamic criteria that have been used to distinguish and group philological activities at various times.

(You can find links to published materials just below.)

Education

PhD. Department of English, New York University. Expected May 2021.

BA. English, University of Cambridge (Magdalene College); first-class hons.; 2011

Journal Articles

2021. Philology and the Progress of Knowledge in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, English Literary History 88.3 (2021)

2017. Counter-Philology: Ezra Pound as Translator of Provencal and Cavalcanti, 1917–32, Textual Practice 33.4. (2019; web 2017)

Talks

2020. ‘Conversant about all the Sciences’: Philology and the Progress of Knowledge in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Jan 8–10

2019. Philology, Knowledge, and Morphology in The Origin of Species, Forms, History, Narrations, Big Data: Morphology and Historical Sequence, Centro Studi Arti della Modernità, Nov 21–22

2019. Troubling Mediation: Philological Poetry and the Academy, British Association of Modernist Studies, Jun 20

2019. Reflux Philology: From Knowledge to Language; Or, There and Back Again, Modern Language Association, Jan 3–6

2018. Eighteenth-Century Philology; Or, How to Reconcile the Universal and the Particular, Eighteenth-Century Literature Colloquium, New York University, Oct 18

2018. Philology, Keywords: Coming to Terms with the Environmental Humanities, Royal Holloway University of London, Feb 20

2017. At the Traverse of the Wall: Archaeological Transformations in David Jones and Thomas Percy [video], Theoretical Archaeology Group, Dec 18–20

2017. Hugh MacDiarmid, Translation, and History, Northeast Modern Language Association, Mar 23–26

2017. Whither the Caesura: The Question of ‘Scoto-Saxon’ in the Eighteenth Century, Modern Language Association, Jan 5–8

2016. Unreading the Fragment, Poetry and Political Theory: The Bureau of Imaginative Proposals, The New School, Apr 23–24

2015. Countertranslations: Ezra Pound’s Provencal English Gesnings, Modernist Studies Association, Nov 19–22

2014. A Terrible Beauty is Born: Transformations, Complicity, and Anglo-Irishness in W. B. Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, Transformations, University College London, May 30

Fellowships & Awards (Select)

2019. Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, New York University

2019. Global Research Institute Fellowship, New York University

2018. Robert Halsband Fellowship, New York University

2018. Jerrold Seigel Fellowship in Intellectual and Cultural History, New York University

2017. Global Research Institute Fellowship, New York University

2016. Predoctoral Summer Fellowship, New York University

2014–19. MacCracken Fellowship, New York University