John Guillory
Professor of English, New York University

Professor Guillory joined the faculty of New York University in 1999 after previously teaching at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard universities. His research and teaching interests include Renaissance literature, philosophy, and political theory as well as the constellation of topics represented by his influential Cultural Capital: the history of criticism, the sociology of literary study, twentieth-century literary theory, and the canon debate. He has been a leading thinker about the evolving position of literary studies and the academic profession in general within societies both past and present. Currently he is writing a book on the sociology of literary study titled "Literary Study in the Age of the New Class" and another book on the emergence of philosophical prose in England, from Francis Bacon to Adam Smith, titled "The Prose of Modernity: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Poetry in Early Modern England."

Selected Publications:

• Books:
  • Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993)
  • Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton and Literary History (1983)
• Recent articles include:
  • "The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading," in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber (Routledge, 2000)
  • " 'To Please the Wiser Sort': Violence, Philosophy, and Hamlet," in Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, eds., Psychoanalysis, Historicism and Early Modern Culture (Routledge, 2000)
  • "Bourdieu's Refusal," Modern Language Quartlery, Dec. 1997
  • "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want," Profession 1996 (online version)
  • "Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-Esteem," Collected Essays on Milton, ed. Christopher Kendrick (G.K. Hall, 1995)
  • "Literary Critics as Intellectuals: Class Analysis and the Crisis of the Humanities," in Rethinking Class, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Myron T. Gilmore (Columbia Univ. Press, 1994)
• Professional positions include:
  • Editorial board of ELH
  • Executive Committee, Folger Shakespeare Library
  • Supervisory board of The English Institute, 1996-98
  • Modern Language Assoc. Committee on Professional Employment, 1996-97