Richard F. Kroll
Professor, English
School of Humanities
School of Humanities
Adjunct Professor in Philosophy and Theatre Arts
PH.D., University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Irvine
118 KH
Mail Code: 2650
Irvine, CA 92697
118 KH
Mail Code: 2650
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Eighteenth Century English and Comparative Literature; Drama; History of Literary Theory; Literature and Philosophy; Cultural Studies and Criticism; History and Theories of Rhetoric
Academic Distinctions
1999 UCI Outstanding Professor in the Humanities
Research Abstract
Richard Kroll's interests include rhetoric, its history and theory, philosophies of language, history of linguistics, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Milton, history of science, literary theory, drama, British empiricism. He taught on the East Coast for eight years between 1984 and 1992 before returning to California. Kroll has held a number of fellowships, both national and local, and, apart from articles on philosophy, print culture, the novel, and drama, his books include The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century; (as editor) Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640-1700; and two anthologies of essays on the 18th-century novel. He is presently engaged on a book on Restoration drama and seventeenth-century political economy.
His bias is historical. He likes (as it were) to begin with questions that we consider of general philosophical or theoretical interest, and looks to see how they are differently reconfigured in and by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. This often happens in such a way that the very shape of the question becomes virtually unrecognizable, which he takes as an imaginative challenge. This kind of challenge has obvious scholarly implications; but he also sees it as related to the humanities' commitment to a sustained attention to texts, and thus to what he calls the 'higher literacy.'
His bias is historical. He likes (as it were) to begin with questions that we consider of general philosophical or theoretical interest, and looks to see how they are differently reconfigured in and by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. This often happens in such a way that the very shape of the question becomes virtually unrecognizable, which he takes as an imaginative challenge. This kind of challenge has obvious scholarly implications; but he also sees it as related to the humanities' commitment to a sustained attention to texts, and thus to what he calls the 'higher literacy.'
Publications
Authors of Traffick: Political Economy and Restoration Drama. Cambridge, forthcoming
The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century. Johns Hopkins, 1991
(with Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin). Philosophy, science, and religion in England, 1640-1700. Cambridge UP, 1992
Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2586
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2586
Last updated
11/04/2005
11/04/2005