Research Expertise and Interest

rhetoric, comparative literature, Renaissance literature, poetics, early modern political theory, the Frankfurt School

Research Description

Victoria Kahn teaches Renaissance literature, rhetoric, and poetics both in Comparative Literature and in the English Department at Berkeley. In recent years her work has been on seventeenth-century English literature (especially Milton), the literature of the European Renaissance, and early modern political theory. Her book Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton, 2004) explores the emergence of contract theory in the literature and political thought of mid seventeenth-century England. It argues that contract theory should be seen as part of the linguistic turn of early modern thought, when government was imagined in terms of the poetic power to bring new artifacts into existence. Contract theory should thus be seen not simply as the forerunner of liberalism but as anticipating the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics. Other recent work includes an essay on the reception of Machiavelli for The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, an essay on Job as a subtext for Milton's Paradise Regained, published in ELH, an essay on Petrarch's Secretum for The Cambridge Compansion to Petrarch, and The Future of Illusion: Political Theory and Early Modern Texts (Chicago, 2014). Her most recent book is The Trouble with Literature (Oxford, 2020).

Before coming to Berkeley she taught at Princeton University and UC Irvine. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, Harvard's Villa I Tatti, as well as a UC President's fellowship.