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Womersley, Professor David
Job Title: Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature
College: St. Catherine's
Period/ Subject: 18th Century
Email address: david.womersley@ell.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
I have research interests in the ‘long eighteenth century’, and also to a lesser extent in the early modern period. My doctorate was on the historian Edward Gibbon, on whom I have written two monographs, and whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I have edited for Penguin. I also have a long-standing interest in sixteenth-century historiography and historical drama, on which subject my monograph, Divinity and State, was published by OUP early in 2010. I am a General Editor of the CUP ‘Complete Writings of Jonathan Swift’, for which I have edited the volume devoted to Gulliver’s Travels (to be published by CUP, probably in 2011). Two incipient research projects are, first, a reading of English literature of the period 1760-1788 in the context of the public language of colonial tension and war, and second, a reading of Defoe's novels in the context of public affairs.
Teaching Areas:
I have recently given classes or lectures on the following subjects: ‘English Literature and the French Revolution’; ‘Jonathan Swift’; ‘Alexander Pope’; ‘Some Versions of Gothic’; ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’; ‘Elizabethan History Plays’; 'Defoe'; and 'Gulliver's Travels'. I have recently supervised graduates working in the following areas: Catholic Writing, 1660-1750; The Depiction of Law in the Novel of the 1790s; Philosophic Historiography in England and France; Science and Satire, 1660-1730; The Past / Present Topos in English Literature, 1680-1796; Shaftesbury and Manners; the English Deists.
Recent Publications:
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols (Penguin, 1994); paperback edition, 3 vols, 1995.
A Companion to English Literature from Milton to Blake (Oxford: Blackwells, 2000).
Gibbon and ‘the Watchmen of the Holy City’: The Historian and his Reputation, 1776-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Penguin, 2008).
Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Other Information:
I read English at Trinity College, Cambridge before holding a Junior Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge and then a Lecturership in the School of English at the University of Leeds. I was a Tutorial Fellow in English at Jesus College, Oxford from 1984 until 2002, when I became Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature and took up a fellowship at St. Catherine’s College.
I am a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.
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