Joseph Carroll

I’ve spent the past thirty years leading the movement to integrate the humanities, and especially literary study, with the evolutionary human sciences. I got my PhD in comparative literature right about the time the academic literary world was being convulsed by the poststructuralist revolution (Derrida, Foucault, et co). I felt a profound antipathy to the sterile paradoxes and attenuated abstractions of that theory. I wanted a theory that could get close to the power literature had over my own imagination. After publishing monographs on the Victorian cultural theorist Matthew Arnold and the modern American poet Wallace Stevens, I began integrating the evolutionary human sciences and literary study. All my work as author and editor since the early 1990s has been dedicated to that project. My books in evolutionary literary study are Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), Literary Darwinism (2004), Reading Human Nature (2011), and (co-authored) Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (2012). I produced an edition (Broadview 2003) of Darwin’s Origin of Species and have coedited multiple volumes of essays and journal issues. The most valued official award I’ve been given is a “Lifetime Achievement Award” presented by the Evolution and Human Behavior Society.