On Leave: 2008-2009
Assistant Professor
Department of English

Office: Walker 504
Phone: (773) 702-7980
valenza@uchicago.edu

I work on the relationship between literature and the intellectual disciplines in Great Britain, focusing on the long eighteenth century and the romantic period. My work emphasizes the interactions between academic and public culture in fields ranging from mathematical physics to moral philosophy to poetry. In studying the development of both the sciences and the humanities, I draw on my background in science and engineering, as well as my training in literary scholarship. My wider interests include vernacular science writing, fictionality and the novel, the Scottish Enlightenment, the history of reference books, pre-Victorian women's writing, and linguistic theory. I have published articles on automatic machine summarization of audio documents, on science and literature in the eighteenth century, on narrative theory, and on what humanities pedagogy can learn from science classrooms. At Chicago, I teach courses on the eighteenth century and its modern legacies, broadly conceived.

Graduate: The Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere; Literature and the Division of Intellectual Labor; Wit & Wisdom in 18th-Century Literature; The Theory of Description; Early Enlightenment Epistemology in England; Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Poetry of Milton and Blake.

Undergraduate: Media Aesthetics; Science & Literature in the 18th Century; Enlightenment and Revolution 1660-1820; Critical Perspectives.

Ph.D., Stanford University, 2003.  Teaching at Chicago since 2003.