Erik Simpson

Erik Simpson's literature courses focus on British and Irish writing from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular attention to British Romanticism, Jane Austen, and James Joyce. He often approaches literature through the history of books and other material texts, from medieval manuscripts to artists' books and texts produced by digital technologies. In this area of study, he has created an upper-level seminar on The History and Future of the Book and a Tutorial on Remaking the Book.

Simpson currently serves as Director of Grinnell's Center for Teaching and Learning, where his work includes building community around pedagogical development and working with many collaborators on issues surrounding digital pedagogy and the place of artificial intelligence in liberal arts education. His earlier administrative commitments have included serving as the Principal Investigator of Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry (a partnership between Grinnell and the University of Iowa funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and co-chairing the planning committee for Grinnell’s new Humanities and Social Studies Center.

Simpson has written two books. The first, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature, 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 final chapter draws out the project's implications for the study of transatlantic blackface minstrelsy's emergence in the 1830s and 1840s. Simpson's second book, Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790-1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money (2010), addresses the ways in which writers in Britain and the United States explored new possibilities of professional authorship by portraying mercenary writers, fighters, and lovers. 

More recently, Simpson has begun to work in book and paper arts (Instagram: ErikTheSimpson) and has published scholarship in a wide range of fields, from a series of articles on the written representation of dialect speech in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in collaboration with Carolyn Jacobson) to a study of James Joyce’s adaptation of Irish and blackface minstrelsy, especially in Ulysses.