David Thomas
Associate Professor
Faculty Fellow at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies
Areas of study
- British - 18th and 19th
- British - 20th and 21st
- Gender and Sexuality
- Postcolonial/Global
- Religion and Literature
Education
Ph.D. in English, University of California, Davis (1996)
B.A. in Honors and Philosophy, University of North Dakota (1988)
Research and teaching interests
British Victorian and Modernist Literature and Culture, Critical Theory, Social Theory, Language Theory, Philosophy, Music History and Theory, Art History
Biography
Professor Thomas, raised as a mobile military brat, is not exactly from any one place but keeps the USA West Coast close to heart due to extended family there, He began his higher education at the University of North Dakota, earning a 1988 BA in Honors and Philosophy, with Minors in English and Music. His 1996 Ph.D in English was completed at the University of California, Davis, with a dissertation on Oscar Wilde. His subsequent research and teaching took was at three institutions: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; George Washington University, Washington, DC.; and the University of Notre Dame. In Germany, he studied one year as an undergraduate and later taught one year as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow, respectively, in Freiburg and Mainz.
Representative publications
- Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
- "George Eliot's Romola: Historical Narration and the Communicative Dynamics of Modernity." In A Companion to George Eliot. Eds. Harry Shaw and Amanda Anderson. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 129-40.
- "Liberal Legitimation and Communicative Action in British India: Reading Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters." ELH: English Literary History 76.1 (Spring 2009): 153-87.
- "The 'Strange Music' of Salome: Oscar Wilde's Rhetoric of Verbal Musicality." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 33.1 (March 2000): 15-38.
- "Gödel's Theorem and Postmodern Theory." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association 110.2 (March 1995): 248-61. Winner of the MLA William Riley Parker Prize for 1995.