Timothy Harrison

My work examines the conditions that enabled the literary representation of the first-person perspective in early modernity. My writing and teaching focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, often as it relates to philosophy, theology, the sciences, and the literatures of other cultures and periods. 

I am jointly appointed in the Department of English, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, and the Committee for the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. I am also Associated Faculty in the Philosophy of Religion at the Divinity School, Resource Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature, a member of the faculty in Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, and a Resident Dean in the Woodlawn West Residential Commons. My articles have been awarded both the James Holly Hanford Award and the Albert C. Labriola Award from the Milton Society of America, and I have twice been the recipient of the John Donne Society’s Distinguished Publication Award. My teaching has been recognized by the University’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring and by the College’s Mark Ashin Fellowship.  

My first two books explore the history of first-person experience in relation to the beginning and end of human life. Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines the role played by poetry in the emergence of the concept of consciousness in the work of John Milton and Thomas Traherne, as well as René Descartes and John Locke, among other figures. In John Donne's Physics (University of Chicago Press, 2024), my co-author Elizabeth D. Harvey and I reconsider Donne’s representation of the body and embodiment in the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. 

I am currently working on two book projects. In Horizons of the Mind: Self and World in Early Modern Persian and English Poetry, my co-author Jane Mikkelson and I construct a comparative literary history of mindedness. We seek to explain the relationship between lyric poetry and concepts of mind across early modern Eurasia by focusing on the work of two philosophical poets: Bedil of Delhi from northern India and Thomas Traherne from rural England, both of whom composed poetry that explores questions about the nature of the human mind. In Milton’s Freedom, I examine the most important concept in Milton’s writing—human freedom—by reading Paradise Lost in relation to its literary, rhetorical, philosophical, and theological contexts. What are we? Who are we? For Milton, the answers to these questions lie in a proper understanding of human freedom. I argue that, for Milton, such understanding is to be found not in philosophy or theology, but in poetry.