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Visiting Associate Professor
Thomas Simmons works primarily in American literature, poetry, nonfiction writing,
and 18th-century British studies, with secondary fields in African American
Studies and literary theory. He earned his A.B. with distinction from Stanford in
1978, then worked briefly for the Christian Science Monitor before being
offered a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford. He received his
M.A. from Berkeley in 1983 and his Ph.D. in 1988; he has served as an
assistant and associate professor at both MIT and the University of Iowa.
The author of four books of nonfiction and one book of literary criticism, he is
currently at work on a study of imperial failure in 18th-century Britain; this new
project takes methods of postcolonial criticism and turns them back on colonialism,
examining problems as diverse as the social construction of madness and the
relationship between the solution to the problem of longitude and the subjugation of
African territories. A resident of Iowa City, he spends most of his time in Grinnell,
primarily because at one point several years ago he memorized the location of
every book in Burling and thus never needed to bother again with a card catalogue
or computerized index when doing his research (the recent reorganization of
Burling has been only a minor setback).
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