Samuel Diener

Samuel Diener

Former PhD candidate in English, secondary field Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
diener
  • Region: Atlantic World; Britain; Iberia; North America; Pacific World
  • Time: 16th Century; 17th Century; 18th Century
  • Theme: British Literature; Colonialism; Cultural History; History of Empire; History of Gender and Sexuality; History of Science; History of the Book; Environmental Humanities; Maritime Humanities; Portuguese Literature; Spanish Literature


I specialize in early modern and eighteenth-century British and American literature, culture, and history of the book, informed by the new materialisms and affect theory. I do comparative work in Spanish and Portuguese, and I am working on a book of poetry inspired by the years I spent in the fishing and foodservice industries before attending university. I am a PhD candidate in English with a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

My dissertation considers maritime exploration narratives from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, focusing on the ways that readers articulated national identity, inflected by race, gender, and class, both on and with the physical books they used. The project has been supported by residential research fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library and Huntington Library, as well as a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship and a Mellon/ACLS Completion Fellowship (2020-21). My July 2019 article in Women Writers in Context approaches this topic through the work of Eliza Haywood, and offers a set of digital tools I built to trace Anglophone women writers' engagement with global geographies. 

I've also been busy with a long-term project on affect and emotional practices in early merchant-capitalist societies, read through material culture. My January 2019 article in Eighteenth Century Fiction is part of this work. I write more broadly about new materialist scholarship for The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and in reviews for other journals.

Contact Information

People: Filtered Search

People: Time Period Search