Dr Dan Sperrin, Trinity
ds972@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am a research fellow working in literature, politics, and history 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
Broadly speaking, I work on the long history of state affairs and political change in Britain 1485-1832, with an emphasis on wider geopolitical and interstate concerns. In the English faculty context, I mainly publish on political literatures - with a special interest in satire and satirists. I've just finished writing the first long history of political satire in English literature for Princeton UP called State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature (April 29th 2025). The book covers all periods c.500-2000, with an introduction on the complicated political history of Roman satire and its background of state transformations. The book can be found here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691195582/state-of-ridicule?srsltid=AfmBOooK0Tqs3ff4U61PfA4QGrNW4Yo9-9w5fOuE0nWqbB7kmtOnmbpg
My second book, which I've also just co-edited, is an edition of 'Gryll Grange', the final novel published a civil servant at the East India Company called Thomas Love Peacock. This will become the final volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock. In the edition, I have focussed on Peacock's relationship with the intellectual frontier of the East India Company and its associated spheres of imperial administration.
As of 2025, I am writing the first scholarly biography of the antipodean liberal cartoonist Sir David Low (1891-1963). The book will be called Satirist At War. Using the extensive cache of biographical documentation which is currently held by the Beinecke, I am offering an archival study of Low's interactions with the Ministry of Information and intelligence services, which will demonstrate how and why he was influential within the broader allied information space - so influential, in fact, that he was singled out for execution by the Nazi leadership.
Alongside the books, I am publishing on things like mock-heroic literature, Augustan poetics, and the reception of the ancient satirists after the Restoration.
Wider interests include the methodological and philosophical spheres of longue durée history, relationships between political theory and practice, war finance and foreign policy, transformations of state institutions, international relations in the early modern period, and the history of intelligence tradecraft. In creative and literary terms, I am also interested in 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:
State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature (Princeton University Press). Forthcoming April 29th 2025.
'Gryll Grange', Vol.7 of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. Freya Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016 -).
Articles on Swift:
— 'Hatred, Rationality, and State Insecurity: the late Satires of Swift' [forthcoming 2025]. A study of Swiftian satire as a reaction to both domestic and foreign security threats known to the Anglo-Irish clerical elite within the pale.
— 'Swift's War and Peace', Review of English Studies, 74 (2023), pp.668-83. A study of Swift's secretarial service to the ambassador and intelligencer Sir William Temple and Swift's later engagement with European literatures of diplomatic tradecraft and international law. Winner of the Richard Rodino Prize 2022-2023 for the best article on Swift and his age awarded by Swift Studies and the Ehrenpreis Centre (Münster, Germany).
— ‘Splitting Allegiances: A Reading of Swift’s On the Words — Brother Protestants and Fellow Christians’, Cambridge Quarterly, 52:1 (2023), pp.38-59. A study of Swift as an orthodox clerical statesman and his rejection of Protestant nonconformity, looking at overlapping ecclesiastical and parliamentary contexts.
— ‘Swift’s Control: Rhetorical Strategies at Work in Maxims Controlled in Ireland’, Swift Studies, 37 (2022), pp.156-176. A study of Swift's engagement with deep civic failures intrinsic to eighteenth-century Ireland under English rule. The essays ranges across Whitehall, the English Treasury, and the Irish House of Commons.
— ‘Cozening Swift and Dryden’, Essays In Criticism, 68:2 (2018), pp.167-189. A short study of Swift's literary engagement with the (distantly related) satirist John Dryden, a pro-Stuart arbiter of state literatures who became an Anglo-Catholic Jacobite after 1688.
Articles on other satirists:
— 'Imperial Satire Redux: A Political Reading of Dryden's Discourse on Satire', Literature and History, 33:2 (2024), pp.94-118. A new interpretation of Dryden's work on satire as a document of Tory state reason and an intervention in the Jacobite information sphere postdating 1688.
— ‘The Augustan Plath: “Gulliver” and Other Poems’, The Journal of Modern Literature, 47:1 (2024), pp.98-117. An assessment of Sylvia Plath as a poet responsive to post-war reconsolidations of neoclassical Augustan literature at Anglo-American universities.
— ‘Wyatt: Satirist in Secret’, Essays In Criticism, 73:1 (2023), pp.9-29. A study of the strange formal verse satires composed by the diplomat, ambassador, and intelligencer Sir Thomas Wyatt. The article looks into Tudor foreign policy, interstate intelligence gathering after the break from Rome, and engagements with Florentine republican literature in the context of Tudor autocracy.
— ‘Butler’s Doubtful Heroism’, Literary Imagination, 24:3 (2022), pp.1-15. A short study of the anti-Presbyterian satirist Samuel Butler and the formation of doggerel poetics under a restored monarchy codifying its settlement by redirecting its Virgillian idealisations.
— ‘Pope’s Judgment: the Essay On Criticism Manuscript and its Footnotes’, The Bodleian Library Record, 30:1-2 (2017), pp.95-111. A bibliographical and book-historical examination of a prominent Alexander Pope manuscript held by the Bodleian library in Oxford.
Books and articles on graphic satire:
— Satirist at War: A Biography of David Low
— 'Hogarth's Don Quixote', Master Drawings, 62:1 (2024), pp.3-20. An extended study of Hogarth and Cervantes looking at Anglo-Spanish relations postdating the Treaty of Utrecht and at the patronage network overseen John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville (1690-1763), who had helped to prosecute the Great Northern War. This article was published in a special issue of Master Drawings 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.
