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Department of English

Jonathan Lamb

Professor Emeritus
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Distinguished Research Professor

Jonathan Lamb has taught at the University of Auckland, Princeton University and Vanderbilt University.  He has mainly specialized in eighteenth-century literature, chiefly fiction; but his interests have extended to postcolonial issues in the Pacific, the fiction of W.G. Sebald and J.M. Coetzee, and issues surrounding historical reenactment.   For some time he has been interested in the relation between literature and diseases such as scurvy and madness.

Representative publications

BOOKS (recent)

  • Scurvy: the Disease of Discovery,  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 305
  • The Things Things Say, issued as a Princeton University Press paperback July, 2016
  • The Things Things Say, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. xxix, 275

 

SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUES (recent)

  • The Natural History of Scurvy, ed. Jonathan Lamb, Nigel Rigby and Robert Blyth, Journal for Maritime Research 15: 1 (2013), pp. 114

 

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS (recent)

  • Review article of Jeremy Coote (ed.), Cook-Voyage Collections of ‘Artificial Curiosities’ in Britain and Ireland, 1771–2015, and Neil Chambers, Endeavouring Banks. Exploring collections from the Endeavour voyage 1768–1771 in Journal of the History of Collections 29:3 (November 2017), 1-14
  • `No Story, No Myth,’ (review of Nicholas Thomas’s Islanders:  The Pacific in the Age of Empire) in Criticism 58:3 (Summer 2016, publ. 2017), 523-28
  • `Scurvy and the Terra Incognita,’ in Imagining the Oceans on Arcade, the Stanford University online site: http://arcade.stanford.edu/colloquies/imagining-oceans
  • `Why Scurvy is still a Snake in our Nutritional Lost Paradise,’ Zocalo Public Square, March 21, 2017, pp. 1-6: ‪ http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2017/03/21/scurvy-still-snake-nutritional-lost-paradise/ideas/nexus/
  •            also picked up on the NPR station KCRW, Los Angeles, pp.1-4: http://zocalo-on.kcrw.com/2017/03/why-scurvy-is-still-a-snake-in-mankinds-nutritional-lost-paradise/
  • `Black bones, gangrene, and weeping:  the unwelcome return of scurvy,’ The Guardian:  Global Development Professionals Network, February 20, 2017, pp. 1-6; online https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/feb/16/black-bones-gangrene-hallucinations-weeping-return-scurvy?CMP=twt_gu
  • `Scurvy and the enhancement of the senses,’ Canadian Medical Association Journal, online www.cmaj.ca , August 8; print, October 18 (2016) pp. 1-2
  • `Scorbutic Fruit and the Problem of Sin,’ SEL 56: 3 (Summer 2016), 495-514

 

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS (recent)

  • `Scurvy and the Terra Incognita,’ Public Domain Review Selected Essays, ed. Adam Green, Cambridge: PDR Press, 2016, pp. 67-83
  • `Persons and Things,’ The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences, ed. Adriana Craciun and Simon Schaffer, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 133-43
  • `Shandeism and the Shame of War,’ in Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russell (eds), Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 16-36.

 

REVIEWS (recent)

  • John Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment, Journal of Pacific History 51 (2), 2016, 217-18
  • Katherine Foxhall , Health, Medicine, and the Sea: Australian Voyages, c.1815–60, in History, 99/ 334, (January 2014) 186–187
  • `The Sublime Redivivus,’ review essay of Timothy Costelloe ed., The Sublime from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2012) in Eighteenth-Century Life 39:3 (September 2015), 74-77

 

FELLOWSHIPS AND RESEARCH GRANTS (recent)

  • VIO research grant, co-applicant, Alistair Sponsel PI, ($20,000, 2016-17)
  • Fellowship at the Humanities Research Center, Rice University, one year @ $60,000, 2014-15 (declined)
  • Guggenheim Fellow, ($40,000) 2012-13

 

At the moment my teaching embraces the history of science, especially empirical science, modern fiction, and the origins of the novel.  I want to extend it into the emerging field of oceanic studies, which would include not only the shores of the seas but also what lies beneath them.

My research at the moment has two foci:  the first is reenactment, editing a volume of keywords on the topic with Vanessa Agnew (University of Essen) and Juliane Tomann (University of Jena) to be published next year by  Routledge.  The second is editing a volume of essays on The Cultural History of the Sea in the eighteenth century, which will be the fourth in a series of six to be published by Bloomsbury next year.  Meanwhile I am developing  an ever-stronger interest in the history of aesthetics, especially as it concerns the perception of colour.