About
Erik L. Johnson teaches in the Humanities and English departments at San Jose State University. Erik studies Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature with a special interest in cross-Channel influences and translations. Erik earned a B.A. from Yale University in English and Renaissance Studies, then edited non-fiction at W. W. Norton & Company in New York before entering the English Ph.D. program at Stanford University. He has published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, contributed to volumes published by Bloomsbury and Cambridge University Press, and received a conference prize for research presented to the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Education
Ph.D. English, Stanford University
M.A. English, Stanford University
B.A. English & Renaissance Studies, Yale University Publications
“Telling Time in the Fiction of Mary Hearne and Daniel Defoe,” in
British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830, edited by Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon, Bucknell University Press, 2022. For book info including full TOC and contributor list: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/british-literature-and-technology-1600-1830/9781684483952
“‘Life Beyond Life’: Reading Milton’s
Areopagitica through Enlightenment Vitalism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 3 (spring 2016),
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/613455
Teaching “The Country Wife,” in How to Teach a Play, ed. Miriam Chirico and Kelly Younger (Bloomsbury, 2020), https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-teach-a-play-9781350017535/
Teaching “The Way of the World,” in How to Teach a Play, ed. Miriam Chirico and Kelly Younger (Bloomsbury, 2020), https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-teach-a-play-9781350017535/
Projects
Erik’s dissertation, “Theatrical Realism: Staging Reality in French Theory and British Fiction, 1670–1764,” argues that a new emphasis on performance aspects of drama in French and English criticism brought literary theory and empirical philosophy into increased contact in ways that have shaped the development of British prose fiction. Authors of special interest in this study include Madame de Lafayette, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, Henry Fielding, and Eliza Haywood. Upcoming Talks and Conferences
“Reckoning with the Haitian Revolution across Atlantic Genres: Comparing Pigault-Lebrun’s Le Blanc et Le Noir (1795) and Leonora Sansay’s Secret History (1808),” upcoming ASECS 2023, “Genres of the Atlantic II” session, St. Louis, MO. Memberships
Modern Language Association
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
California Faculty Association
