Blair Hoxby

Bio

Blair Hoxby writes on literature and culture from 1500 to 1800. Two of his foremost interests are the commercial culture and the theatrical practices of the period. Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) examines the impact of the commercial revolution on writings of major seventeenth-century poets such as Milton and Dryden. Together with Ann Coiro, he is editing a large multi-author collection of essays on Milton in the Long Restoration. Two of his new books nearing completion focus on tragic dramaturgy. What Is Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon seeks to free the early modern poetics of tragedy and the early modern theatrical repertoire from the expectations erected by the romantic and post-romantic philosophy of the tragic that has dominated tragic theory from Schelling to the present. Reading for the Passions: Performing Early Modern Tragedy argues that the passions, not deeds or character, hold the keys to early modern tragic performance.

Recent and forthcoming articles include Passion, for 21st-Century Approaches: Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry Turner (forthcoming, OUP); What Was Tragedy? The World We Have Lost, 1550-1795, Comparative Literature 64 (2012): 1-32; Allegorical Drama, in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama: What Benjamin Got Wrong, in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machowsky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); and "Areopagitica and Liberty," in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Academic Appointments

• Professor, English

Administrative Appointments

• Associate Professor of English, Stanford University (2007 - Present)
• Associate Professor of History and Literature, Harvard University (2005 - 2007)
• Associate Professor of English, Yale University (2003 - 2005)
• Associated faculty, Renaissance Studies, Yale University (2003 - 2005)
• Assistant Professor of English, Yale University (1998 - 2003)
• Associated faculty, Renaissance Studies, Yale University (1998 - 2003)

Honors & Awards

• Internal Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center (2009 - 2010)
• Visiting External Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center (2005)
• Morse Fellowship, Juilliard School (2001 - 2002)
• Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize, Yale University (2001)
• John Addison Porter Prize, Yale University (1999)
• Monroe Kirk Spears Award, for the best essay in Studies in English Literature 1998, Rice University (1999)
• Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, Yale University (1996 - 1997)
• Richard J. Franke Interdisciplinary Fellowship in the Humanities, Yale University (1994 - 1996)
• Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, U.S. Department of Education (1992 - 1996)
• William K. Wimsatt Fellowship, Yale University (1992 - 1994)
• Wendell Herbruck Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Oxford (1989 - 1990)
• Rhodes Scholarship, University of Oxford (1988 - 1990)
• Briggs Traveling Fellowship, English Department, Harvard University (1988)
• Hoopes Prize, Harvard University (1988)

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

• Director of Undergraduate Studies, English Department, Stanford University (2011 - 2014)
• Faculty Director of Education as Self-Fashioning, Stanford University (2012 - 2014)
• Member, Search Committee, Romanticism search, Stanford University (2013 - 2013)
• Member, Curriculum review taskforce, Stanford University (2013 - 2014)
• Referee, Oxford University Press (2012 - 2013)
• Referee, University of Pennsylvania Press (2012 - 2013)
• Referee, Ashgate Press (2012 - 2013)
• Referee, Milton Studies (2011 - 2013)
• Referee, Modern Philology (2011 - 2013)
• Member, Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Practices, Stanford University (2011 - 2012)
• Member, Search Committee, Pre-1900 Poetry, Stanford University (2010 - 2011)
• Member, Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Practices, Stanford University (2010 - 2012)
• Member, Publication committee, Milton Society of America (2010 - 2011)
• Project Director, Timeline Project, Stanford English Department (2010 - 2010)
• Member, Executive Committee, Milton Society of America (2009 - 2013)
• Member, Graduate Studies Committee, English Department, Stanford University (2008 - 2011)
• Director of Graduate Admissions, English Department, Stanford University (2008 - 2011)
• Member, Selection Committee, Rhodes Trust (2008 - 2012)
• Member, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Steering Committee, Stanford University (2008 - 2009)
• Convener, The Value of Music Workshop, Stanford University (2008 - 2009)
• Member, Admissions Committee, Yale College (2003 - 2004)
• Director of Undergraduates Studies, Renaissance Studies, Yale University (2002 - 2004)
• Organizer, Medieval and Early Modern Colloquium, Yale University (2001 - 2004)
• Member, State or District Selection Committees, Rhodes Trust (1993 - 2001)
• Class Secretary, Rhodes Trust (1992 - 2014)

Professional Education

• Ph.D., Yale University, English (1998)
• M.Phil., University of Oxford, English Studies, 1500-1660 (1990)
• A.B., Harvard University, English and American Literature and Language (1988)