Professor of English and American Literature at New York University
Clifford Siskin is the Henry W. and Alfred A. Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University and the Director of The Re:Enlightenment Project at New York University and the New York Public Library. His subject is the interrelations of literary, social, and technological change, with a particular emphasis on print culture: both its historical formation and its current remediation in the face of the electronic and the digital. Links between past and present inform all of his work, from his sequencing of the genres of subjectivity (The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, Oxford) to his recovery of literature’s role in the formation of the modern disciplines (The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830, Hopkins). He is also co-editor, with William Warner, of This Is Enlightenment, a volume that offers an answer to the question Kant made famous: What is Enlightenment? (Chicago, 2010). His latest monograph asks when and how the central genre of Enlightenment became the thing that we now love to blame: the SYSTEM (forthcoming from Chicago). Professor Siskin is also co-editor, with Anne Mellor, of the Palgrave-Macmillan monograph series in “Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print.” He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1978 and has been the George Delacorte Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the A. C. Bradley Chair at the University of Glasgow, the Waynflete Lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, and Chair of English at SUNY Stony Brook.