Professor of English, New York University

Clifford Siskin’s 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). His latest book 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 new 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.

Clifford Siskin is a member of the History of Reading work group.