Research Expertise and Interest

culture, politics, English, comparative literature, popular music, history of emotion, French, renaissance and early modern European culture, the romance languages, the ideology of literary genre, the literary construction of nationhood, the rhetoric of historiography

Research Description

Timothy Hampton holds the Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professorship and is former director of the Townsend Humanities Center.  He works on Renaissance and early modern European culture, in both English and the Romance languages. His research and teaching involve the relationship between politics and culture, and focus on such issues as the ideology of literary genre, the literary construction of nationhood, the relationship of poetry and music, and the history of diplomacy.  He is the author, most recently, of "Fictions of Embassy:  Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe" (Cornell, 2011), "Bob Dylan:  How the Songs Work," (Zone Books, 2019), and "Cheerfulness:  A Literary and Cultural History" (Zone Books, 2022).