Dustin D. Stewart, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Dustin D. Stewart is an Assistant Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and held academic posts in Atlanta and Colorado Springs before moving to New York City. Futures of Enlightenment Poetry is his first book.

Winner of the 2021 Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

"... Futures of Enlightenment Poetry is an innovative contribution to historical poetics, not least because it puts forward a grounded and persuasive thesis about the complex conditions for a poetics that propels itself into the future." - Mary Helen McMurran, University of Western Ontario, Genre

"Stewart's book is a powerful reminder not just about the fecundity of this spiritualist tradition but-even more importantly-that "disembodiment and re-embodiment do seem to need each other and to correct for one another's excess, to belong together if only in their incompatibility." - Jess Keiser, Modern Philology

"the book strongly illuminates not only individual poets, some of whom have been insufficiently studied, but also the connections among them. In examining these poets, Stewart displays considerable erudition and sensitivity to literary theory and literary history as well as to the historical context framing the poetry he studies." - Henry Weinfield, University of Notre Dame, Review 19

"Stewart charts an exciting revisionist account of the way poetry negotiates the boundary between spirit and matter. The story he tells of the poets who grapple with the notion of disembodiment and re-embodiment presents a new genealogy of Enlightenment poetry, placing James Thomson, Thomas Gray, Edward Young, William Cowper, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mark Akenside, and Anna Letitia Barbauld at the center of a narrative that unfolds from Milton's Paradise Lost to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Grounding his discussion in detailed accounts of eighteenth-century practice, Stewart presents a reading of Enlightenment poetry that will change the field of historical poetics." - Elizabeth Kraft, University of Georgia