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 called State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature (April 29th 2025). 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 scholarly 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 also midway through a monograph on eighteenth-century political theory and practice as it relates to the period's satirical literature, which is going to be called Wit's Dark Strain: The Geopolitical Conditions of Augustan Satire. 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.
Wider 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:
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 -). Forthcoming summer 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.
