Humanities Faculty

Kristine Haugen

Assistant Professor of English

Research interests

Early modern literature and intellectual history.

Research Statement

Book manuscript in progress:

Richard Bentley: Scholarship and Criticism in Eighteenth-Century England

The last decade has seen provocative studies of the rise of an English literary canon and English literary criticism in the eighteenth century. My book extends this narrative back to the later seventeenth century, and into the criticism of Greek and Roman texts in the international republic of letters. Through a focused case study of the mercurial Bentley (1662-1742), I show that the criticism of classical texts was an energetic and contentious field marked by technical innovation, bold theorizing, and unabashed self-promotion. There was no single classical canon, nor any single philological method, for early students of English poetry to emulate. While Bentley's philological techniques are recognized as a model for Pope, Theobald, and other eighteenth-century editors of English poetry, Bentley's deepest impact on English scholarship resulted from his invention of himself as a public intellectual, using his positions in the church, the university, and the court to bring philology out of the scholar's closet and into the drawing-room.

A book-length project on prison writings from Marco Polo to Nelson Mandela.

While Michel Foucault's writings have inspired an outpouring of new work on the history of mass imprisonment, less often discussed is what I suspect is mass imprisonment's converse: the virtual obsolescence in the West of the imprisonment of élites, including intellectuals. Nonetheless, prison was once viewed as an especially unfortunate, yet by no means unpredictable interlude in an intellectual career. What historical changes, then, separate the seventeenth-century cases of Walter Ralegh, Tommaso Campanella, and Hugo Grotius--all of whom wrote copious scholarly works while incarcerated and relied on personal connections in their bids for release--from an Oscar Wilde or Nelson Mandela, who could hope to attract broad public support and wrote in prison to that end? Treating writers of poetry and fiction as members of a broader class of intellectuals, this project inquires not only about the development of our languages of individual human rights and intellectual freedom, but also about the material and social settings that have enabled so many prisoners to write, conduct research, and even correct printer's proofs from their cells.

Publications from a project on the interpretation of dreams in western Europe, ca. 1450-1700.

Conceived as a case study for exploring exchanges and boundaries between intellectual disciplines in the period, this was my major project during the first two years of my postdoctoral fellowship. At the Warburg Institute, I vastly expanded my knowledge of early modern medicine, Aristotelian philosophy, and theology--all fields which, along with poetry, historiography, and ethnography, drew the dream as an object forcibly into their own habits of description and argumentation. In the future, this project may become a book; currently, I am seeking to publish articles arising from the research.