After spending 23 years at the University of Oxford as a student, faculty member, and ultimately full professor — where he was also Head of Graduate Studies for the Humanities Division and Director of Ertegun House — Rhodri Lewis moved permanently to Princeton in 2018. His interests lie principally in the literary, cultural, and intellectual histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (He is uncertain when this period begins and ends, but sometimes feels sure that it must run from at least as early as 1453 to at least late as 1761.) Related preoccupations include bibliography and textual criticism; the status of drama as an idea and a series of practices, both theatrical and literary; the status of early modern English as a language informed by Latin and by other European vernaculars; the diffusion and decline of humanism as a cultural and educational ideology; the history of science, the history of religion, and the history of political thought; the frequently contested lines of demarcation between human and animal forms of life; the no less frequently contested status of “poetic” (and/or “literary”) language; the history of literary criticism.
In 2017, he published Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, a critical re-evaluation of the most famous play of all. It was a Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2018. His new book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, builds on his account of Hamlet to offer a powerfully original reassessment of Shakespearean tragedy in the round—of what drew Shakespeare toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter. At the moment, he is at work on a life of the great literary critic Frank Kermode, whose papers are now housed in the Firestone Library; once done with that, he’ll be returning to the early modern world. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from institutions including the Leverhulme Trust, the Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, the Huntington Library, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Outside the academy, he writes for publications including The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, The Literary Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He can be found on X/Twitter as
