Robert DeMaria

Professor of English on the Henry Noble MacCracken Chair
Robert DeMaria wearing a white shirt, gray jacket and floral tie against a light background.

Robert DeMaria, Jr. is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College where he has taught since 1975. His main field of study is eighteenth-century British literature. He is the author of three monographs on the life and works of Samuel Johnson (1709–84) and the general editor of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, a series of 23 volumes (1958–2018). He is also interested in the history of the Language, the presence of the classical tradition in British literature, and the history of books.

BA, Amherst College; PhD, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
At Vassar since 1975

Contact

845-437-5660
Eleanor Butler Sanders Hall
Box 140
Hours
Monday 1-3pm and by appointment

Selected Publications

British Literature 1640-1789: Keywords. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018

Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces, Proposals and Dedications. Ed, with O M Brack, Jr. Vol. XX of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018

Biographical Writings: Soldiers, Scholars, and Friends, with O M Brack, Jr. Vol. XIX of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. 2016.

British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1996. 4th ed., rev., 2016.

The Blackwell Guide to British Literature. 4 vols. Ed., with Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher. Blackwell/Wiley, 2014.

“Fraudulence and Savagery in Three Eighteenth-Century British Writers,” Il Conforto Letterario, ed. Lia Guerra (2016), pp. 37-55.

“Johnson and the Teutonic Roots of English.” The Harp and the Constitution, ed. Joanne Parker, Brill 2015, pp. 47-65.

“Careful and Careless: Epic Tales in the Editing of Dr Johnson,” Times Literary Supplement, 6 March 2015, pp. 14-15.

“Samuel Johnson’s Editorial Lexicography,” Dictionaries, 35 (2014), 146-61.

“Publishing Johnson’s Works: The First Two Hundred Years,” Tercentenary Essays on Samuel Johnson, ed. Howard Weinbrot, Huntington Library, 2014: 343-66.

Grants, Fellowships, Honors, Awards

NEH Scholarly Editions Grant for the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2011-2014.

Katherine F. Pantzer Fellow in Descriptive Bibliography at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2009-10.

Photos

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