Dr. Kevin Cope
Professor - English
Distinguished Research Master
Robert Thomas and Rita Wetta Adams Professor of English Literature
Bachelor's Degree(s): B. A., Pitzer College
Master's Degree: M. A., Harvard University
PhD: Ph. D., Harvard University
Phone: (225) 578-2864
E-mail: encope@lsu.edu
Office: 210J Allen
Area of Interest
18th Century Literature, intellectual history
Awards & Honors
Honorar and Visiting Appointments
Distinguished Research Master
Schick Lecture, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, November 2008 (lecture titles below).
Ida Wise East Memorial Lecturer, Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, Virginia, April 2008 (lecture title below).
Millennial Lecturer, International Beckford Society, London, June 2000 (lecture title below).
Lecturer, Georgia State University Visiting Scholars Series, November 1998 (lecture title below).
Keynote Speaker, Triennial Presidential Conference on the Bicentenary of the Death of George Washington, Shreveport, September 1998 (lecture title below).
Guest Lecturer, New Europe College and University of Bucharest, Romania, June 1998 (lecture titles below).
Visiting Fellow, Thomas Reid Institute for Research into Cultural Studies and the Humanities, Aberdeen, Scotland, April 1997.
Humboldt Research Scholar, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, at Würzburg
University, 1995–1996 (details below).
Guest Lecturer, Thomas Reid Humanities Institute, University of Aberdeen, Scotland (lecture title below).
Marie Fletcher Distinguished Lecturer, Nicholls State University, March 1995 (lecture title below).
Distinguished Visiting Professor, State University of New York at Plattsburgh, November 1993 (lecture titles below).
Visiting Lecturer, Rose Hill House of Studies, Aiken, South Carolina, July 1993.
Faculty Member, Louisiana State University Summer in London Program, 1990.
Visiting Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford, England, 1990.
Grants/Funded Research
Faculty Research Grant (Louisiana State University), for the project “Enlightenment Encyclopedisms,” 2006–2007.
Manship Summer Research Grant, for research on subterranean environments in the eighteenth century, summer 2006
Faculty Travel Grant Award, Louisiana State University, for travel to Paris conference on eighteenth-century studies, December 2004
Fellow, Liberty Fund Seminar, “Liberty, Nature, and Wisdom in the Philosophical Tales of the French Enlightenment,” Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, October 2002.
Fellow, Liberty Fund Seminar, “Liberty and Love in Geoffrey Chaucer,” Portsmouth, New Hampshire, March 2000
Research Fellow and Stipendee, James Smith Noel Collection, Shreveport, 2000
Research Fellowship, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, for cooperative research at the University of Würzburg, Germany, January and May through August 1999
Humboldt Research Scholar, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, 1995–1996, Würzburg University
Principal Investigator and Team Leader, “Engaging Cultural Legacies” grant from the American Association of Colleges, Washington, D. C., (grant title: “Comparative Heritages,” for core curriculum development, 1991–1992.
Research Grant, LSU Foundation Fund for Special Projects, 1990–1991.
ASECS Research Fellowship, McMaster University Library, McMaster University, October–November 1990.
Research Grant, LSU Foundation Fund for Special Projects, 1989–1990.
Publication Award, Hyder E. Rollins Publication Fund of the Harvard University Department of English and American Literature and Language, for 1990.
Travel Grant, to Munich ICLA meeting, from the American Council of Learned Societies, August 1988.
LSU Summer Research Grant (Council on Research), June 1984.
Travel award and grant, Conference on Blake and Criticism, Santa Cruz, May 1982.
Selected Publications
Books
In and After the Beginning: Inaugural Moments and Literary Institutions in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 2007).
John Locke Revisited (New York: Twayne-Macmillan, 1999).
Criteria of Certainty: Truth and Judgment in the English Enlightenment, University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Co-Editor, The Enlightenment by Night: Essays on After-Dark Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (forthcoming, AMS Press, New York).
Co-Editor, Adventure: An Eighteenth-Century Idiom. Essays on the Daring and the Bold as a Pre-Modern Medium (New York: AMS Press, 2009).
Co-Editor, Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the “Long” Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 2004).
Co-Editor, Talking Forward, Talking Back: Critical Dialogues with the Enlightenment (New York: AMS Press, 2002).
Editor, George Washington in and as Culture (New York: AMS Press, 2001).
Co-Editor, Intercultural Encounters (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1999).
Editor, Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice, and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, AMS, 1993.
Editor, Compendious Conversations: The Method of Dialogue in the Early Enlightenment, Lang International, 1992.
Annuals
Founder and Editor, 1650–1850: Ideas, Æsthetics, and Inquiries in the Early
Modern Era. Volume #1: fifteen essays, June 1994. Volume #2: fourteen essays, eleven reviews, July 1996. Volume #3: sixteen essays, eighteen reviews, March 1997 Volume #4: seventeen essays, thirteen reviews, November 1998 Volume #5: thirteen essays, nineteen reviews, April 2000 Volume #6: fifteen essays, eighteen reviews, September 2001 Volume #7: twenty-one essays, eighteen reviews, June 2002 Volume #8: sixteen essays, sixteen reviews, April 2003 Volume #9: sixteen essays, twenty-five reviews, November 2003 Volume #10: seventeen essays, eighteen reviews, September 2004 Volume #11: eighteenth essays, twenty-two reviews, January 2006 Volume #12: three essays, ten-year cumulative index, June 2006 Volume #13: thirteen essays, twenty-three reviews, January 2007 Volume #14: fourteen essays, seventeen reviews Volume #15: thirteen essays, twenty-one reviews Volume #16: fifteen essays, nineteen reviews
Co-General Editor, ECCB: The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography,
September 2000–present. Volume 30 (2009) for 2004 Volume 29 (2007) for 2003 Volume 28 (2006) for 2002 Volume 27 (2005) for 2001 Volume 26 (2004) for 2000 Volume 25 (2004) for 1999 Triple Volumes 22, 23, & 24 (2003) for 1996–1998 Double Volumes 20–21 (2001) for 1994–1995
Editions
Editor, Above the Age of Reason: Miracles and Wonders in the Long Eighteenth Century, nos. 3–6 of British Ideas and Issues (set of annotated facsimile texts on early-modern supernaturalism) (New York: AMS Press, 2006).
Editor and annotator, in British Ideas and Issues, of Thomas Woolston’s A Discourse on the Miracles of Our Saviour, In View of the Present Controversy between Infidels and Apostates (London, circa 1728) (publication details above).
Editor, Introducer, and Commentator, volume 3 of Eighteenth-Century British Erotica II, Alex Pettit and Patrick Spedding, General Editors (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004).
Editor, Introducer, and Annotator, Edmund Curll, volume 2 of Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Alex Pettit and Patrick Spedding, General Editors (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002).
Book Series General Editorship
Co-editor, “Anglo-Amerikanische Studien/Anglo-American Studies,” book series, Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt. TITLES: Beth Swan, Fictions of Law Rosamaria Loretelli and Roberto De Romanis, eds., Narrating Transgression
Special Issues
Editor, “Permutations of Post-Correctness,” Quarterly Journal of Ideology 19, 3–4 (1996).
Essays
“The Holy Surprise Party: Glimpses of Divinity in Suddenly-Emerging Literary, Artistic, and Geographical Settings, 1660-1785,” forthcoming in Religion and the Age of Enlightenment.
“Building a Nation of Jesters: The Educative and Exemplary Goals of the Joking Biography,” for Mentoring, ed. Tony Lee (forthcoming).
“Making Darkness Visible Again: Graves, Caverns, Meteors, and Mirrors,” forthcoming in The Enlightenment at Night, ed. Serge Soupel, Paul-Gabriel Boucé, and Alex Pettit.
“Smiling Angels, Bibles, and Buicks” Fundamentalist Autobiography and the Evangelist,” in Klaus Stierstorfer and Axel Stähler, eds., Writing Fundamentalism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), 77–107.
“Fading Fast but Still in Print: The Brink of Visibility and the Form of Religious Experience, Spinoza to Cowper,” in Kathryn Duncan, ed., Religion in the Age of Reason (New York: AMS Press, 2009), 19–42.
“Pious Times and Priestcraft Begin Again: The Upright Sexuality of the Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Life 33 (2009): 9-18.
“Beauty: An Essential Characteristic of a Civilized Culture,” Modern Age: A Quarterly Review 49 (2007, published 2008): 372–82.
“Augusta and Columbia, Or, Cherry Trees in Green Belts: Urban and Urbane Conceptions of the Frontier from Dryden and George Washington to Twain, NASCAR, and Beyond,” in Anne Hegerfeldt, James Fanning, Jürgen Klein, and Dirk Vanderbeke, eds., The Mighty Heart or The Desert in Disguise? The Metrapolois between Realism and the Fantastic (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 2007), 106–129.
“Under the Enlightenment: Subterranean Extensions of the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” in Greg Clingham, ed., Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History, and Culture, 1500–1800 Commemorating the Life and Work of Simon Varey (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 289–313.
“Never Better than When Late: The Left Behind Series and the Incongruities of Fundamentalism,” in Fundamentalism and Literature, ed. Catherine Pesso- Miquel and Klaus Stierstorfer (Macmillan, 2007), 181–204.
“A Cultural Eruption in the East, Or, The Caliph of Wörlitz’s Volcano Re- Commissioned,” Beckford Journal 12 (2006): 23–29.
“Refereeing the University Press, Or, A Parliament of Publishers,” The Eighteenth- Century Intelligencer [ns]20:1 (February 2006), 11–18.
“The Panorama of Theodicy, Or, Appealing Impressions of Evil in Assorted Eighteenth-Century Descriptive Writers, with a View toward Leibniz,” in Rudolf Freiburg and Susanne Gruss, eds., “To Vindicate the Ways of God to Man”: Literature and Theodicy, ed. Rudolf Freiburg (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 2004), 113–129.
“The Millennium Continues to be an Incident: Occasional Reflections for the Renewability of Beckford’s Reputation,” in Kenneth W. Graham and Kevin Berland, eds., William Beckford and the New Millennium (New York: AMS Press, 2005): 283–307.
“How Beckford Keeps Making Himself Relevant: Or, Is the Millennium and ‘Incident’?” The Beckford Society Annual Lectures 2000–2003, ed. Jon Millington (Bristol: Beckford Society, 2004), 3–24.
“Elastic Empiricism, Interplanetary Excursions, and the Description of the Unseen; Henry More’s Cosmos, John Hutton’s Caves, and George Friedrich Meier’s Quips,” in Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the “Long” Eighteenth Century (publication details above), 109–46.
“Informative Imprecision, Or, the Intelligent William Collins,” Trivium 34 (2003) (special issue on William Collins): 69–85.
“Cinematic Sacramentalism: William Cowper, Material Symbols, and the Later Augustan Attempt to Say Everything,” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 2 (2002): 45–71.
“Algorithmic Apocalypse: Chaos, Cognitive Science, and the Conditions of Satire,” in Talking Forward, Talking Back (publication details above), 337–376.
“Imageless Supermen and Women in Interregnum Interstices: Davenant’s Apparitional Drama and the Restoration of Commonwealth ‘Entertainments,’” in Walter Goebel, Saskia Schabio, and Martin Windisch, eds., Engendering Images of Man in the Long Eighteenth Century (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2001), 3–21.
“How General George Outlived his Own Funeral Orations,” in George Washington in and as Culture (publication details above), 65–98.
“Atlas Unloaded: Maps, Guides, Gazetteers, Illustrations, and Insinuations Appertaining to the Unknown,” in Klaus Stierstorfer and Heinz Antor, eds., English Literatures in International Contexts (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000), 165–182.
“John Locke Didn’t Have It all Locked Up, Or, Locke on the Emergence, Development, and Branching of Knowledge, Education, Politics, Religion, and Hairdressing,” in T. E. D. Braun and John A. McCarthy, eds., Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment (Atlanta and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 91–105.
“Byron and the Permanent Originality of Uninformative Advice, Or, Recipes for a Kanamit,” in Petra Bridzun and Frank Erik Pointner, eds., Byron as Reader (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2000), 175–89.
“The Glory that WAS Rome—and Grenada, and Rhodes, and Tenochtitlan: Pleasurable Conquests, Supernatural Liaisons, and Apparitional Drama in Interregnum Entertainments” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32 (1999, published 2000), 1–17.
“The Colossus of New Roads, Or, The Reconstruction of Gulliver: Mineral Drama and the Colloquial Supernatural from the Colonial Era to the Age of Encounters,” in Intercultural Encounters (publication detail above), 385–419.
“A Spot of Tea on Silken Trunks, Or, The Industry of Experience,” in Rüdiger Ahrens and Fritz-W. Neumann, eds., Fiktion und Geschichte in der angloamerikanischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 1998), 137–59.
“All Aboard the Ark of Possibility, Or, Robinson Crusoe Returns from Mars as a Small-Footprint, Multi-Channel Indeterminacy Machine,” Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 160–163.
“Eighteenth-Century Studies is on a Roll: Plotting a Bearing for the Bibliothek Otto Schäfer,” Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer 12, i–ii (April 1998): 15–19.
“Irregularity in the Classroom, Or, Learning is not a Thing,” Quarterly Journal of Ideology 19, 3–4 (1996): 57–82.
“Dusting the Crop Circle: Beckford, UFO-Nauts, and Alien Housekeeping,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 346–348 (1996; pub. 1997): 443–448.
“The Heron and the Salamander, Or, Cogni-Botanical Maps and the Hermeneutics of Planet X,” (Trans)Formations of Cultural Identity in the English-Speaking World, ed. Jochen Achilles and Carmen Birkle (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 1998), 211–39.
“Richardson the Advisor,” in Albert J. Rivero, ed., New Essays on Samuel Richardson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 17–33.
“Norman’s Conquest: Red Seas, Gulf Shore, Vigorous Jacuzzis, Depth Charges, Professional Shallows, and the Theory of Theorylessness,” for Rüdiger Ahrens and L. Volkmann, eds., Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 1996), 161–181.
“The Noel Library: Sign of a New Millennium in Scholarship,” East Central Intelligencer, February 1996, 20–24.
“Locke, Mandeville, and the Insignia of the Future: Terminators, Mutants, Vectors, Plurals, Emblems, Maps, Targets, Proposals, Narratives, Crawfish,” in Carla Hay and Syndy Conger, eds., The Past as Prologue: Essays to Celebrate the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of ASECS (New York: AMS Press, 1995), 245–280.
“Fractions, Impulses, and Infinitesimals: Instant Processing of the Modern State by Assorted Advisors, Cudworth to Coleridge,” in Jürgen Klein, ed., State, Science, and Modernization in England: From the Renaissance to Modern Times (New York, Zürich, and Hildesheim: George Olms Verlag, 1994), 106–140.
“Shelley is Damned Funny After All: Reclaiming, Revisioning, and Re-Laughing at Early Romantic Jokes and Jests,” in Horst Höhne, ed., Romantic Discourses (Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1994), 168–87.
“Turbulent Forms: Vortectical versus Concentric Forms, Descartes to Blake,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 304 (1992 [pub. 1993–4]): 1148–50.
“Beckford and the Emerging Consciousness: Projective Collecting and the Aesthetical Dynamics of Acquisition,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century 305 (1992 [pub. 1993–4]): 1813–1818.
“Squirrell’s in the Breeches: Onanism, Indigestion, Diarrhea, and Anti-Panaceatic Discourse,” Eighteenth-Century Life 17 (1993): 1–31.
“Resurgences of Christianity in the Enlightenment,” Faith and Culture II, vi, 5–8, 1992.
“Directions to Signify: Exploring the Emblems of Enlightenment Allegory,” Enlightening Allegory (publication details above), 171–218.
“The Octopus of Multiculturalism,” Faith and Culture II, iv, 3–9, 1992.
“Spinning Descartes into Blake: Spirals, Vortices, and the Dynamics of Deviation,” in Spiral Symmetry, eds. István Hargittai and Clifford Pickover (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company PTE, 1992), 399–440.
“American Eighteenth-Century Studies: The State of the Art,” Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten (special issue on international movements in literary studies, ed. Rüdiger Ahrens) 3 (1992): i, 23–52.
“Seminal Disseminations: Dialogue, Domestic Directions, and the Sudden Construction of Character,” in Compendious Conversations (publication detail above), 167–180.
“When the Past Presses the Present: Shillings, Cyders, Malts, and Wines,” in Reader Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carl R. Kropf (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 15–43.
“Conversations Containing Truth: Dialogues with Berkeley’s Lying God,” Man and Nature/L’Homme et la Nature 9 (1990): 45–55.
“A Roman Commonwealth of Knowledge: Fragments of Belief and the Disbelieving Power of Didactic,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 3–25.
“Electronic Mail, International Computer Networks, and the Journal Editor of the Future,” for Editors’ Notes 9 (1990): ii, 36–39.
“Exit, Intermediary, or Interior: Gay, Defoe, and Leibniz and the Impassability of Moralized Space,” Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, 62–67.
“A Rhapsody on Disagreement: The Shaftesburian Essay and the Literary Incorporation of Strife,” Prose Studies 12 (1989): 207–223.
“Defoe, Berkeley, and Mackenzie and the Social Contract of Genre,” in Transactions of the Seventh International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989), 937–940.
“William Beckford’s Vathek as Philosophical Monologue,” in Transactions of the Seventh International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989), 1673–1676.
“The Propositions of Faith: The Ideology of the Royal Society and Bunyan’s Academy of Maxims,” Papers of the Mississippi Philological Association 1988 (pub. 1989): 28–38.
“Moral Travel and the Pursuit of Nothing: Vathek and Siris as Philosophical Monologue,” for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 (1988): 167–186.
“Rational Hope, Rational Benevolence, and Ethical Accounting: Johnson and Swift on the Economy of Happiness,” The Age of Johnson 1 (1987): 181–213.
“Rational Hope, Rational Benevolence, and Johnson’s Economy of Happiness,” Eighteenth Century Life 10 (1987): 104–121.
“Satire: The Conquest of Philosophy,” in Donald G. Marshall, editor, Literature as Philosophy/Philosophy as Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 175–184.
“The Conquest of Truth: Wycherley, Rochester, Butler, and Dryden and the Restoration Critique of Satire,” Restoration 10 (1986): 19–40.
“Halifax and the Art of Power,” Rocky Mountain Review 39 (1985): 241–250.
“The Infinite Perimeter: Human Nature and Ethical Mediation in Six Restoration Writers,” Restoration 5 (1981): 58–75.