English

INTERESTS: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century English and American Literature; Legal History and Constitutional Law; Early Modern Drama; Race & Ethnicity; Constitutional Law; Shakespeare; The First Amendment

Elliott Visconsi writes about and teaches seventeenth and eighteenth century English and American literature. His first book, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, was published in April 2008 by Cornell University Press. This book describes the later seventeenth-century literary transformation of equity from a principle of legal interpretation into an ethos of deliberative citizenship. Treating authors such as Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, John Dryden, Henry Neville, Aphra Behn, and Daniel Defoe, this book demonstrates the manner in which the newly public enterprise of serious literature helps to create the conditions in which political liberalism can thrive.

Currently he is near completion of his second book—“The Invention of Civil Religion: The Literature of Church and State in Postrevolutionary England and America”—which describes the intellectual and cultural history of the principle of separation of church and state between 1649 and 1791. This study suggests that literary culture plays a deeply influential role in the development of a constitutional sensibility in which the robust separation of church and state is understood to be best for government and for religion. Moreover, the project argues that it is in the domains of the literary that the concept of “civil religion” emerges.

The next project, tentatively titled “Citizenship Before Rights,” is a study of the early modern  literary mediation of political belonging in the years before the age of revolutions, which promulgate  sweeping and modern dignitary rights of citizenship. Some of the structuring concepts include asylum and refugeeism, denizenship, superfluity and statelessness (including slavery), “household” dependency relations, and the moral hazards attached to religious pluralism. Other work in progress focuses on the persistence of race in contemporary English and EU debates about religious defamation and interference with religious speech.

His work has been supported by an ACLS Fellowship, a Macmillan Center Director’s Award for Junior Faculty, and most recently by a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship to study constitutional law at Yale Law School. He also enjoys working with the Connecticut Humanities Council on a variety of programs, including law & literature seminars for the general public and Shakespeare seminars for Connecticut judges.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS :
Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2008)

"The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v. Taylor (1676)," Representations, 103 (Summer 2008)

"Measure for Measure: No Remedy," in Approaches to Teaching Law & Literature, eds. Matthew Anderson, Cathrine Frank, and Austin Sarat (New York: Modern Language Association, in press and forthcoming Fall 2008)

"Vinculum Fidei: The Tempest and the Law of Allegiance," Law & Literature 20:1 (March 2008)

"The First Amendment and the Poetics of Church and State," Raritan 26:3 (Fall 2006)

"Trojan Originalism: Dryden's Troilus & Cressida," in The Age of Projects, ed. Max Novak (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008)

"A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Behn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter," ELH 69:3 (2002).

TEACHING:
English 125 Major English Poets
Directed Studies: History and Political Thought
English 234 Drama & Fiction from Shakespeare to Fielding
English 322 World Citizens and Native Sons
English 688 (Grad Seminar)—Race, History, and Memory 1649-1789