The Department of English presents the 2014 Duffy Lecture with David Fairer, professor of 18th-century literature at the University of Leeds. Fairer will lecture on “Sustainable Economies: Lessons from the 18th-Century Georgic.”
A reception will follow the lecture.
Fairer’s research interests center on 18th-century poetry, criticism, and scholarship, especially early romanticism. He is particularly interested in tracing connections between the 18th century and the so-called ‘Romantic period,’ and relating them to contemporary debates about ideas of continuity – a concept that became crucial during the French Revolution and its aftermath.
His wider research on 18th-century poetry covers the full range, including Pope and Swift, pastoral, landscape, and georgic poetry; the work of women poets (Finch, Montagu, Leapor, Barbauld); Gray, Collins, the Wartons; Chatterton, Macpherson, and Cowper. He is also interested in epistolary writing; the growth of literary history and historical scholarship in the 18th century; the sublime in literature and painting; eighteenth-century aesthetics; lyric, gothic and sentimental modes; Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; and Blake as poet and artist.
This lecture series honors the great teacher-scholar Joseph M. Duffy (1924-1988), who taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1954 to 1988.