Baker, Samuel
Assistant Professor

Education: Ph.D. U. of Chicago 2001
Office Location: CAL 308
Office Hours: T 12:30-3:30
Phone: (512) 471-8389
sebaker@mail.utexas.edu

Research Interests: Professor Baker has completed a book about British Romantic writers and the sea, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. This book, which will be published by The University of Virginia Press in 2009, argues that the Romantic idea of universal culture took shape within imaginative horizons fundamentally shaped by Britain’s maritime-imperial aspirations. Dr. Baker is also writing a series of essays on ethical dispositions in the Romantic novel, tracking how stoicism and skepticism, among other attitudes, ceased to refer to specific philosophical schools and began to be seen as general psychological orientations.

Before returning to academia to take his Ph.D., Professor Baker worked as a journalist and book reviewer, as well as in museums and libraries. These experiences left him something of a generalist, and he maintains broad interests in literature and art, in film and media studies, and in politics. His current enthusiasms include works by Samuel Prout, Elizabeth Bishop, and Raul Ruiz.

On a more conceptual level, he is preoccupied by the artistic evocation of place, especially as it intersects with the shaping of collective and individual subjectivity; by ethical theory, especially in relation to politics and gender and sexuality; and by problems in the aesthetics and sociology of representation.

Recent Publications: Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. (The University of Virginia Press, forthcoming).

''The Maritime Georgic and the Lake Poet Empire of Culture,'' forthcoming in ELH.

''Teaching the Waverley Novels: An Intertextual Approach.'' Forthcoming in Evan Gottlieb and Ian Duncan, eds., Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels (MLA, 2008).

Book Review. J.R. Watson, Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars (New York: Palgrave, 2003). European Romantic Review 17:5 (2006), 636-40.

''Animated Looks: The Romantic Literary Sketch and the Unfinished Project of Modern Transparency.'' Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 6 (2006), 73-96.