Louis Cameron, Darwin

Biographical Information

I read English as an undergraduate at Merton College, Oxford, where I received a first and the Gibbs Prize for distinguished performance in my Finals examinations. I completed my MPhil at Cambridge under a Clare Hall Boak Studentship, ranking second in my cohort.

My current doctoral studies are generously funded by the Vice-Chancellor’s & Darwin College Dr Pamela Raspe Studentship.

I welcome enquiries to supervise the English Literature 1500–1700 and Practical Criticism papers, as well as dissertations related to my research interests. 

 

Research Interests

My doctoral research examines irony as a rhetorical mode and a psychological attitude in seventeenth-century texts of various genres. I am particularly concerned with early modern theology, epistemology, and natural philosophy, and with writers including Joseph Hall, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Robert Boyle, and John Locke. I also examine the work of Schlegel, Kierkegaard, and Richard Rorty as it relates to my interest in the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of irony. 

My other interests include early modern biblical interpretation and biblical poetics, early modern ecological thinking, and the concept of the ineffable in early modern thought.

Selected Publications

“Contingency, Irony, and Sociability: Robert Boyle’s Experimental Style.” The Seventeenth Century, March 2025, 1–26. doi:10.1080/0268117X.2025.2477781.