Dr Samuel Diener, Faculty of English

sjd90@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

Samuel received his PhD in English with a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University in 2022. He is now an Arts Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Research Interests

Samuel specialises in early modern and eighteenth-century literature, culture, and history of the book. He focuses on the Anglophone world, but also does comparative work in Portuguese and Spanish. His research examines practices of reading, writing, and commodity consumption through which people imagined their identity from the early colonial period through Romanticism. 

Selected Publications

Samuel’s current book project, The Maritime Travel Book and the Collective Imagination, considers maritime exploration narratives from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, focusing on the ways that readers articulated collective identity both on and with the physical books they used. His January 2025 article in PMLA is adapted from this project.

Samuel has also been busy with a long-term project on affect and emotional practices in early merchant-capitalist societies, read through material culture. His January 2019 article in Eighteenth Century Fiction is part of this work. He has written more broadly about new materialist scholarship for The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and in reviews for other journals.