Ian Duncan, Professor

Office: 456 Wheeler

Phone: 510-642-3877

Areas of Interest

British literature 1740-1900. Scottish literature. The novel. Walter Scott, James Hogg. Enlightenment; Romanticism. British empiricism, natural history, and the human sciences, Hume to Darwin.

Current Research

Following the publication of "Scott's Shadow," I am thinking about a new project on the novel and human nature in the age of "the science of man," from Hume to Darwin. So far I've been working on Lamarckian fictions by Scott (Count Robert of Paris) and Hugo (Notre-Dame de Paris). Other projects include a new edition of James Hogg's "Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" for Oxford World's Classics, and general editorship of the Oxford History of Scottish Literature.

Professional Statement

I was educated at King's College, Cambridge (B.A., 1977) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1989). I taught for several years in the English department at Yale before being appointed Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Oregon in 1995. I came to Berkeley in 2001, where I've taught courses on Scotland and Romanticism, Darwin and Culture, Gothic, Walter Scott, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel. I am currently a Vice-President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a member of the editorial board of Representations.

Selected Publications and Papers Delivered

Monographs:

Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007): Saltire Society / National Library of Scotland Research Book of the Year, 2008

Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge, 1992; paperback, 2005)

Editions and edited collections:

Travel Writing, 1700-1830: An Anthology, coedited with Elizabeth Bohls (Oxford, 2005)

James Hogg, Winter Evening Tales (Edinburgh, 2002; revised paperback edition, 2004.

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1996) and Rob Roy (1998); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World (1995; 1997) (all in Oxford World's Classics).

Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, co-edited with Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge, 2004)

"Scott, Scotland and Romantic Nationalism," co-edited with Ann Rowland and Charles Snodgrass: special issue of Studies in Romanticism, 40: 1 (2001).

Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels, co-edited with Evan Gottlieb (Modern Language Association, 2009).

Selected articles:

“Scotland and the Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period, ed. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 251-64.

“Edinburgh and Lowland Scotland,” in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge, 2008: forthcoming), pp. 159-81.

“Sympathy, Physiognomy, and Scottish Romantic Fiction,” in Recognizing the Romantic Novel, ed. Jill Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (Liverpool, 2008), pp.249-69

“‘Upon the thistle they’re impaled’: Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernist Nationalism,” in Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939, ed. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (Durham, NC, 2007), pp.246-66.

“Ireland, Scotland, and the Materials of Romanticism,” in Scotland, Ireland and the Romantic Aesthetic, ed. David Duff and Catherine Jones (Lewisburg, PA, 2007), pp.258-78.

“Blackwood’s and Romantic Nationalism,” in Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805-1930, ed. David Finkelstein (Toronto, 2007), pp. 70-89.

“The Exterminating Angel: History and the Fate of Genre,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, special issue: “The Philosophy of the Novel,” ed.Massimo Fusillo (forthcoming, 2009).

"Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment"; "Scott, Hogg, Galt and their circle" (with Douglas Mack), in the Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 3, ed. Susan Manning (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 71-79, 211-20.

"Edinburgh, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Romantic Metropolis: Cultural Productions of the City 1770-1850, ed. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge, 2005), pp.45-64.

"The Pathos of Abstraction: Adam Smith, Ossian, and Samuel Johnson," in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. L. Davis, I. Duncan, J. Sorensen (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 1-19, 38-56.

"Fergusson's Edinburgh," in ‘Heaven-Taught Fergusson': Robert Burns's Favourite Scottish Poet, ed. Robert Crawford (East Linton, 2003), pp. 65-83.

"The Provincial or Regional Novel," in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William Thesing (Oxford, 2002), pp. 318-335.

"The Castle of Otranto," "Waverley," in Il romanzo, Vol. 2: Le forme, ed. Franco Moretti (Turin, 2002), pp. 119-125, 135-142.

"‘Reactionary Desire': Ruskin and the Work of Fiction", in Ruskin and Modernism, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls (Houndsmill, 2001), pp. 67-81.

"Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, and the Institutions of English", in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. Robert Crawford (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 37-54.

"Wild England: George Borrow's Nomadology," Victorian Studies, 41: 3 (1998), 381-403.

"The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel and Imperialist Panic," Modern Language Quarterly, 55: 3 (1994), 297-319.

"Darwin and the Savages," The Yale Journal of Criticism, 4:2 (1991), 13-45.

Office Hours

TTh 3:30-5:00 pm