- Southern Virginia University
One University Hill Drive
Buena Vista, VA 24416 - 540-261-8564
Dallin Lewis
Southern Virginia University, Humanities, Faculty Member
- Literature, Political Philosophy, Digital Humanities, Literary Theory, Poetry, History of English Literature, and 21 moreEnglish Romanticism, English Novel, John Milton, Literature and Religion, English Literature, Ecocriticism, 18th Century British Literature, Intellectual and cultural history, Literature & Economics, Transatlantic relations, Transatlantic Literature, British Atlantic, 1600-1800, Eighteenth-Century literature, 18th Century Britain, British Literature, Environmental Humanities, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Jane Austen, English Composition, and Composition and Rhetoricedit
- Prof. Dallin Lewis (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is an assistant professor of English in the Division of Humanities at Southern Virginia University. His scholarly research focuses on eighteenth-century British literature, with emphases in the Atlantic World, environmental criticism, politica... moreProf. Dallin Lewis (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is an assistant professor of English in the Division of Humanities at Southern Virginia University.
His scholarly research focuses on eighteenth-century British literature, with emphases in the Atlantic World, environmental criticism, political economy, and colonialism. He is at work on a book project provisionally titled, "The Plantation Aesthetic: Political Economy and Literary Form in the British Atlantic World," which explores the rise of the plantation complex in the British literary imagination. His work has been published in European Romantic Review, Religion & Literature, Encyclopedia of British Literature, 1660-1789, and The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography. He has also participated in seminars and workshops sponsored by the Wheatley Institute, the Lewis Walpole Library, Notre Dame’s London Center, and the Joseph Smith Summer Seminar.
Prior to Southern Virginia University, Prof. Lewis taught as a lecturer at Gonzaga University, where he developed a literature course for non-English majors on vocation and the meaning of work. At the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his doctoral degree, he developed a course on religion, literature, and the environment, which won the Annual Syllabus Prize for Religion & Literature, and one on ancient and modern tragedies, for which he was awarded an Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award.
B.A. with University Honors, Brigham Young University (2009); Ph.D., University of Notre Dame (2015)edit
Research Interests:
British abolitionist literature, much like abolitionist politics generally, struggled to imagine a post-emancipationist world in which freed Africans and former white slave owners could co-exist peacefully within the British Empire. In... more
British abolitionist literature, much like abolitionist politics generally, struggled to imagine a post-emancipationist world in which freed Africans and former white slave owners could co-exist peacefully within the British Empire. In this essay, I will explore how Peter Newby’s The Wrongs of Almoona (1788) and William Hutchinson’s The Princess of Zanfara (1789) sought to resolve this racial tension by imagining freed African men reconciling with their white counterparts. Specifically, I will argue that to that end, these writers appropriate the conventions of “she-tragedy,” a dramatic genre that not only focuses on the plight of a female victim but also on rapprochement between male characters. However, this attempt to infuse “masculine” values of nobility, restraint, and egalitarian fraternity into abolitionist literature can provide only a partial response to anxieties over emancipation, since this racial rapprochement depends on first excising the presence of the African woman from the plantation.
Research Interests:
Citation: “After Eden: Religion, Literature, and the Environment.” Religion & Literature 46:2-3 (Summer-Autumn 2014): 157-167. Essay on award-winning syllabus.
