Welcome! 

For more than four decades, I’ve been teaching and writing about seventeenth-century English literature and culture, though I’ve been also expanding into the period of the Enlightenment, as I think about how we got to where we are now in America and the West.

I look at the past as a literary person but also a historian, believing that knowing something of our past helps us understand the present, that earlier writers and thinkers have much to say to us now, that they often illuminate challenges we face.  I am a “historicist,” interested in understanding the past on its own terms, recovering it, but I always want to put it in conversation with the present we are living in.  These writers, and their writings speak to us—otherwise there’d be no point in reading and thinking about them.

Thinking, figuring things out, trying to understand significances, sensing that there’s pattern and meaning.

This is what I am compelled to do.

Read, think, write. Over and over again.