Jonathan Kramnick

My research and teaching focus on eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, the foundations of literary theory and criticism, and interdisciplinary approaches to the arts. My most recent book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago, 2023), defends the epistemology of close reading at the heart of contemporary criticism; an earlier version of the argument appeared in Critical Inquiry. In Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award, I asked what distinctive knowledge literary form and the literary disciplines offer to debates about perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagement with the world. On more strictly eighteenth-century topics, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010) explored representations of mind and material objects alongside theories of action in fiction, poetry, and philosophy. My first book, Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge, 1999), examined the role of criticism and aesthetic theory in shaping a national literary tradition.

I publish regularly on professional issues in literary studies, including in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and continue to write on form and method. My current book project, Earthworks: Two Before Romanticism, considers Alexander Pope, William Cowper, and the poetics of designed environments. Although I recently stepped down as director of the Lewis Walpole Library, I remain co-editor of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History for Yale University Press.

Selected Publications

- Alexander Pope’s Earthworks, ELH, vol. 91, No. 4, Winter 2024.

- Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago, 2023)

-“Criticism and Truth”, Critical Inquiry, 2021

- “The Humanities in the Time of Covid-19” Meeting St. podcast with Amanda Anderson, October 2020

- “The Humanities After COVID-19,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 2020

-Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018)

-“What We Hire in Now,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2018 

-“The Way We Hire Now,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2018

-“How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2018

-“Forms and Explanations: A Reply to Our Critics” (with Anahid Nersessian), Critical Inquiry, 2017

- “The Interdisciplinary Fallacy,” Representations, 2017.

- “Form and Explanation” (with Anahid Nersessian), Critical Inquiry, 2017.

- “An Aesthetics and Ecology of Presence.” European Romantic Review, 2015.

- “Literary Studies and Science, a Reply to my Critics.” Critical Inquiry, 2012.

- “Living with Lucretius.” in Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death (Toronto, 2012). 

- “Against Literary Darwinism.” Critical Inquiry, 2011.

- “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.” SEL, 2010.  

- Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010)

- “Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 2007. 

- “Literary Criticism Among the Disciplines.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2002

- Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999).

Courses

Politics, Philosophy, and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century English Literature; Literature and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century; English 126 

updated July 2025