Jonathan Kramnick

Maynard Mack Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies

Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1995

B.A., Cornell University, 1989

My research and teaching range across eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, literary theory and criticism, aesthetics, and the history and practice of literary study. Much of my work asks what is distinctive about the kinds of knowledge made by literature and criticism: how literary form engages perception and action, how criticism develops its arguments from the language of the works it studies, and how the methods of literary study relate to those of neighboring disciplines.

My most recent book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago, 2023), makes a case for close reading as the characteristic method of literary criticism and as a form of skilled writing and inquiry. It argues that criticism produces knowledge through practices of quotation, description, summary, and attention to form that are ordinary to the discipline but difficult to reduce to rules. In that sense, the book brings to the foreground a question that runs through all my work: what literary criticism knows, and how it comes to know it.

Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award, brings eighteenth-century and contemporary accounts of mind into conversation with literary form, considering how literature shapes our understanding of perception, skilled action, and the relation between organisms and their environments. Earlier books are Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), on theories of action and the material world, and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge, 1999), on criticism, aesthetic judgment, and the making of a national literary tradition.

My current work develops these concerns in two directions. One project considers Alexander Pope, William Cowper, and the poetics of designed environments before Romanticism. Another examines close reading as a living practice of writing and inquiry, including what becomes newly visible about that practice in the age of generative AI.

Alongside my scholarly work, I write for broader audiences about literary studies, higher education, and the humanities, especially in The Chronicle of Higher Education. These essays extend my interest in disciplines and their methods to questions about universities, interdisciplinarity, and the conditions under which humanistic knowledge is produced and sustained.

I recently served as director of Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library and remain co-editor of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History for Yale University Press.