Pavneet Aulakh received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University, where he studied poetry. Before joining Vanderbilt University's English Department, he was the Literature Fellow at UCSB's College of Creative Studies. His research and teaching interests include: the intersection of philosophy, literature, and science, particularly across the seventeenth century; the history of the book; poetics and Anglo/American poetic traditions; and medieval literature.

His current book project, Digesting Bacon in 17th-Century England, examines, on the one hand, the literary and rhetorical traditions Francis Bacon inherited and refashioned not only to communicate his project for the renewal of learning (his “Great Instauration”) but also to formulate the methodology for the “Interpretation of Nature” it required; through chapter-length studies of Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, and Margaret Cavendish, this monograph equally focuses on each of these author’s figurative translations of the linguistic and epistemological concerns of the “Great Instauration” into their own individual literary and philosophical works. Rather than advance an influence model highlighting the literary reception of Bacon’s “scientific” ideas, Digesting Bacon redresses our modern disciplinary division of the arts and sciences by insisting on both the centrality of literary traditions of interpretation and representation to Baconian science and the latter’s reformulation within the imaginative literature of the seventeenth century.

Recent Course Offerings:

ENGL 1111 (FYWS): “Women and Power in Shakespeare”

ENGL 1111 (FYWS): “Poetic Science”

ENGL 1220W: “Translating Tragedy”

English 1250W: “The Science of Poetry and the Poetry of Science”

ENGL 3312: “Fabulous History and Cultural Fantasy in the Middle Ages”

English 3314: “‘Assente,’ ‘Intente,’ and ‘Maistrye’ in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”

ENGL 3348: “Radical Milton”

ENGL 3343: “Race and Early Modernity”

English 3720: “The Curious Art of Science”