David Simpson
Professor of English, U. California, Davis

Professor Simpson joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1997. Previously he taught at Columbia U., U. Colorado, Northwestern U., and Cambridge U. His areas of research and teaching are Romanticism and literary theory. His latest book, which bears on the themes of the public humanities initiative, will be forthcoming under the title, Situatedness; Or Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From. He describes his interest in the public humanities (in a note to the conference organizers) as follows: "Start with the fierce glare of Leavisite missionary consciousness, overwritten by Marxist action-compulsion and a felt sense of the British class war—the fight for 'popular culture' in Cambridge in the 1970s—the migration to the USA—five years as dept. chair—redesigning a 'modern' PhD for SUNY Albany some years ago. . . ."

Selected Publications:

• Books include:
  • The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (1995) (press description)
  • Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolution Against Theory (1993)
  • Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (1987)
  • The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (1986)
  • Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (1982)
  • Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979)
  • editor, Subject to History: Ideology, Class, Gender (1991)
  • editor, The Origins of Modern Critical Thought : German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel (1988)
• Recent articles include:
  • "Is Literary History the History of Everything?", SubStance, 88 (1999): 5-16 (online version in .pdf format)
  • "Tourism and Titanomania, Critical Inquiry, 25 (summer 1999): 680 ff. (online excerpt)
  • "Prospects for Global English: Back to BASIC?", Yale Journal of Criticism, 11 no. 1 (1998): 299-305
  • "Raymond Williams: Feeling for Structures, Voicing History," Social Text 30 (1992): 9-26
  • "The Moment of Materialism," in Subject to History: Ideology, Class, Gender, ed. David Simpson (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991): 1-33
  • "Literary Criticism and the Return to 'History'," Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 721-47