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Associate Professor
Erik Simpson's literature courses focus on British writing from Shakespeare
to the present, especially the literature
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His primary research field is
British and transatlantic literature of the Romantic period.
Simpson's first book, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in
British, Irish, and American Literature, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008.
This book first analyzes the emergence of minstrels, bards, and other oral poets
as objects of sustained literary concern in 1750s Britain. It then traces those
figures as Romantic-era writers used them to negotiate ideas of authorship,
gender, and nation. The project emphasizes links between men and women
writers, between canonical and non-canonical texts, and among works of
different genres. The final chapter draws out the project's implications for the
study of transatlantic blackface minstrelsy's emergence in the 1830s and 1840s.
Material from this book has appeared in article form in ELH and
European Romantic Review.
The working title of Simpson's second book is Mercenaries in British and
American Literature, 1790-1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money;
this book is under contract to appear in the series Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures
from Edinburgh University Press.
This project analyzes the ways in which writers in Britain and the United States
explored new possibilities of professional authorship by portraying mercenary
writers, fighters, and lovers. Writers of central interest include
Charles Brockden Brown, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Walter Scott,
Lord Byron, and James Fenimore Cooper. An article from this project is
forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism.
A more detailed account of Simpson's research is available on the
Minstrelsy and
Mercenaries pages of his website.
His interest in computer programming and the use of
technology in humanistic inquiry have led Simpson to create
Connections: A
Hypertext Resource for Literature, which contains his online teaching materials
along with other information, The Transatlantic 1790s,
a database-backed site whose content is written by Grinnell College students, and other web projects described on
this page.
Simpson received his B.A. from
the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University
of Pennsylvania.
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