Faculty Leaders

John Bender

Jean G. & Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature

John Bender has been at Stanford faculty since 1967. His fields of interest include French, Italian, and English Renaissance texts, but lie chiefly in literature of the eighteenth century (including Swift, Defoe, and Richards), women's writing of the period's last decades, and the French novel. His special concerns include the relationship of literature to the visual arts, philosophy, and science, as well as the sociology of literary production, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.

Professor Bender is author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism and Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in 18th-Century England, which won the 1987 Gottschalk Prize for the American Society for 18th-Century Studies for the best book on the 18th century. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Piranesi, Goldsmith, Blake, Godwin, and on theoretical issues. He is co-editor of The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice and Chronotypes: The Construction of Time.