Dr Dan Sperrin, Trinity
ds972@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am a JRF in English at Trinity College. Before I arrived in Cambridge, I completed my BA, M.St, and D.Phil in Oxford. I am also a political cartoonist for The London Magazine. My cartoons and caricatures can be found on Instagram: @dansperrin_cartoons
Research Interests
I mainly work on satire and satirists (with a special interest in the period 1660-1760). I've just finished writing a long history of satire in English literature for Princeton UP, which will be out in Spring 2025. While I was writing the book, I also looked into the parallel history of graphic satire and the long line of graphic satirists which runs from Hogarth through to Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank, Tenniel, and then up to Low and Scarfe in the twentieth century. This material will be gathered together to form various secondary projects outlined below. My second book, which I've also just finished, is an edition of Thomas Love Peacock's 'Gryll Grange', which will become the final volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock.
Having finished both of those projects, I am now writing the first full biography of the cartoonist Sir David Low (1891-1963) called Satirist At War, using the extensive cache of biographical documentation which is currently held by the Beinecke. I am now also midway through a monograph on eighteenth-century mock-heroic literature which investigates the extremely complicated relationship between burlesque/mock-heroism and war (some of the research for this book will be previewed in an article called 'Mandeville the Anglo-Dutch Satirist: War, Elections, and the State Treasury'). In the medium term, I will be writing a follow-up to the Princeton book on the history of graphic satire.
Alongside the books, I am publishing on things like mock-heroic literature, Augustan poetics, and the reception of the ancient satirists after the Restoration.
Other interests include classical reception, the methodological and philosophical spheres of longue durée history, political theory and practice, international relations in the early modern period, the history of intelligence tradecraft, the English reception of Cervantes, the writings and drawings of Mervyn Peake, continental graphic satire (especially Daumier and Goya), and the psychoanalytical writings of R. D. Laing.
Selected Publications
Books:
A History of Satire in English Literature (Princeton University Press). Forthcoming Spring 2025.
'Gryll Grange', Vol.7 of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. Freya Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016 -). Forthcoming 2025.
Articles on Swift:
— 'Swift and the Secret World' [forthcoming 2024]
— 'Swift's War and Peace', Review of English Studies, 74 (2023), pp.668-83.
— ‘Splitting Allegiances: A Reading of Swift’s On the Words — Brother Protestants and Fellow Christians’, Cambridge Quarterly, 52:1 (2023), pp.38-59.
— ‘Swift’s Control: Rhetorical Strategies at Work in Maxims Controlled in Ireland’, Swift Studies, 37 (2022), pp.156-176.
— ‘Cozening Swift and Dryden’, Essays In Criticism, 68:2 (2018), pp.167-189.
Articles on other satirists:
— 'Imperial Satire Redux: A Political Reading of Dryden's Discourse on Satire', Literature and History [forthcoming in the 2024 November issue]
— ‘The Augustan Plath: “Gulliver” and Other Poems’, The Journal of Modern Literature, 47:1 (2024), pp.98-117.
— ‘Wyatt: Satirist in Secret’, Essays In Criticism, 73:1 (2023), pp.9-29.
— ‘Butler’s Doubtful Heroism’, Literary Imagination, 24:3 (2022), pp.1-15.
— ‘Pope’s Judgment: the Essay On Criticism Manuscript and its Footnotes’, The Bodleian Library Record, 30:1-2 (2017), pp.95-111.
Articles on graphic satire:
— 'The Development of David Low's Satire on the Dictators, 1918-1945' [forthcoming 2024, based on archival research on the David Low papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library]
— 'Hogarth's Don Quixote', Master Drawings, 62:1 (2024), pp.3-20. A special issue dedicated to British drawing and engraving. For those interested in new scholarship on Hogarth, this issue contains a related article on Hogarth's Four Stages of Cruelty written by Jennifer Tonkovich and Laurel O. Peterson.
