Prof. Dr. David Alvarez

Geburtsjahr: 1966

Studium:
1989-2002

Wissenschaftliche Anstellungen bzw. Tätigkeiten:
Associate Professor of English Literature, DePauw University (2012-Present; Chair 2017-20)
Assistant Professor of English Literature, DePauw University (2006-2012)

Wichtige wissenschaftliche Funktionen und Mitgliedschaften:
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of California, Davis (2003-2006)
Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, Berkeley (2002-2003)
Visiting Lecturer, Davidson College (2001-2002)
Visiting Assistant Professor of English, University of Rochester (2000-2001)
Guest Professor, English Department, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany, August 2020-August 2021
Visiting Scholar, Friedrich Alexander Universität, Erlangen, Germany, February-August 2017
Visiting Scholar, University of Ferrara, Italy, May-July 2014
Scholar-In-Residence, Symbiosis University Liberal Studies Program, Pune, India. August 2010
Visiting Fulbright Lecturer, English Department, Delhi University, India. January-April 2009

Enlightenment, “Religion”, and Empire in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters

The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) recounts Lady Mary’s travels to Istanbul with her husband, the United Kingdom‘s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1716 to 1718. Most scholarship has focused on Lady Mary’s descriptions of Istanbul, especially her representation of Muslim women, which contests previous travel accounts written by men about the “exotic and despotic” East. Yet about half of her letters describe her travels through Europe. Scholars have recently begun to examine how her Letters contrast the Ottoman empire with central Europe, especially the Habsburg empire. Lady Mary prefers the Ottomans to the Hapsburgs, despite their differences in religion. My research seeks to understand how and why Lady Mary represents Islam as closer to Protestant Christianity than to the Roman Catholicism of central Europe. One effect of her efforts to link Protestantism and Islam is to conceptualize the meaning of “religion” as a global concept. Because this definition of “religion” is fundamental for how Lady Mary understands and overcomes cultural difference, I am exploring the extent to which the tolerant, “secular cosmopolitanism” for which she has been celebrated is actually enabled and limited by the normative secular religiosity her text builds upon and promotes.

Herausgeberschaften

Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830, co-edited with Prof. Alison Conway (University of Toronto Press, 2019).

With Patrick Müller, “Anatomies of Unbelief: Clandestine Dialogues between Swift and Shaftesbury,” Reading Swift: Papers from The Seventh Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Frink-Brill, 2019): 313-42.

Beiträge in Zeitschriften und Sammelbänden

“The Difference Enlightenment Satire Makes to Religion: Hudibras to Hebdo,” Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830 (University of Toronto Press, 2019): 136-52.

"Daniel Defoe's Protestant Roman Catholics: Global Religion, Colonialism, and the Limits of Toleration in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe", I castelli di Yale online VI, 2 (2018) pp. 1-28.

“Shaftesbury’s Non-Secular Cosmopolitanism,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, ed. Patrick Müller (Peter Lang, 2017): 177-195.

“Reading Locke After Shaftesbury: Feeling Our Way Towards a Postsecular Genealogy of Religious Tolerance” in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth Century British and French Literary Perspectives, ed. Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016): 72-109.

“Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and a 1688 Poetics,” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 39.1-2 (Spring/Fall 2015): 101-123.

“Reason and Religious Tolerance: Mary Astell’s Critique of Shaftesbury” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44.4 (Summer 2011): 475-94.

“‘Poetical Cash’: Joseph Addison, Antiquarianism, and Aesthetic Value” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38.3 (Spring 2005): 509-531. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800: Volume 146, edited by Schoenberg, Thomas J, Trudeau, Lawrence J, 93-106. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2008.