Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World
James Egan
Professor of English
Research Interests
17th- and 18th-century British-American writing, the history of the book, the early modern Atlantic world, colonial British-American Orientalism, early modern theories of identity
Biography
James Egan came to Brown in 1991 after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1999, he published, Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing (Princeton University Press). In 2011, he published Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature (Ohio State University Press). His other publications include an essay exploring figures of the East in John Smith's travel narratives, as well as one examining the figure of Alexander the Great in Anne Bradstreet’s poetry. In addition to these writings, Professor Egan has published on Ebenezer Cooke, eighteenth-century Transatlantic mercantile poetry, and Benjamin Franklin.