Prof Peter De Bolla, King's

pld20@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

Peter de Bolla has been Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics since 2009. He has been a visiting Professor in Siegen, at Vanderbilt and New York University.  Between 2014-2018 he was Director of the Cambridge Concept Lab.

Research Interests

Eighteenth Century British cultural history; the history of aesthetics; conceptual history; philosophical aesthetics; digital knowledge.

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Eighteenth century literature; Wordsworth; visual culture of the enlightenment; topics in the history and theory of criticism, especially Kant, Post Structuralism, Cavell; the history of concepts. 

Selected Publications

• The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights, Fordham University Press, 2013
• Aesthetics and the Work of Art, Ed. Peter de Bolla and Stefan Uhlig, Palgrave, 2008
• The Fourth of July and the Founding of America, Profile Books, 2007
• Land, nation and culture 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, Ed. Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
• The Education of the Eye: painting, landscape and architecture in eighteenth-century Britain, Stanford University Press, 2003
• Art Matters, Harvard University Press, 2001
• The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, Ed. Peter de Bolla and Andrew Ashfield, Cambridge University Press, 1996
• The Discourse of The Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject, Blackwell, 1989
• Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics, Routledge, 1988; reissued 2014