Note: I will be on research leave during academic year 2024–25, as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values.
I specialize in the literature and culture of the eighteenth century, with emphasis on Great Britain and a secondary focus on France. My interests include Enlightenment Studies, the rise and theory of the novel, and the crisis of the humanities. A general feature of my work is that I trace the fraught continuities between the eighteenth century and modernity — those long historical threads stretching from the past to where we stand today — including the evolution of secular ethics, the history of human rights, the rise of scientific racism and sexism, the fortunes of prose fiction, and the separation between the humanities and the sciences. But I am also interested in historical discontinuities. Not everything that flourished in the eighteenth century still bear fruit today, and those dead branches reveal the impact of three centuries of intervening history. To learn about the past that persists and the pasts that have vanished helps us appreciate our embeddedness in history but also our advances in time.
MY RESEARCH
I am currently working on several projects, the most important being a book on the legacies of the Enlightenment. Provisionally entitled The Enlightenment Crisis of Values, the book is a transnational history of relativism in the eighteenth century. Focusing on an interdisciplinary archive comprising imaginative literature, philosophical and theological treatises, letters, newspapers, prints, and royal proclamations, the book tracks the origins, features, and consequences of relativism in Britain and France, with subsidiary attention to other national contexts. This history, I propose, helps to explain why the Enlightenment left such disparate legacies, helping to affirm values such as freedom of religion and universal human rights while at the same time laying the groundwork for scientific racism and gender discrimination. I offer a condensed version of the argument here. Please get in touch if you need access.
I am also working on two smaller projects entitled “For a New Rise of Fictionality” (which internationalizes existing accounts of the topic) and “A Short History of Obscurity” (which proposes that quarrels about obscurity in style first emerged in response to early modern regimes of censorship). My first book, Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel (Palgrave, 2016), is a study of the social relevance of prose fiction. Eighteenth-century novelists from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen developed sophisticated arguments to show that fiction could tell the truth about the world. Their theories of the novel, I argue, responded to a suspicion of fiction that accompanied the rise of the empirical sciences. The book reveals that this early clash between novelists and their discontents foreshadowed later contestations about the value of the humanities. You can read a sample review here.
MY TEACHING
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on topics including secularism, the rise of the British novel, literature and ethics, the Enlightenment, and Jane Austen among others. Students interested in sample syllabi can find examples here.
I also direct doctoral dissertations and BA theses focused on the literary and intellectual history of the long eighteenth century (1660–1818). Undergraduate students interested in pursuing an honors thesis with me should follow the attached guidelines . Having read them, be welcome to get in touch.
Students considering applying to graduate school may consult my guide on how to write a good statement of purpose.
MY BIO
Born and raised in Brazil, I hold an M.A. in English Literary Studies from the University of São Paulo (2006) and a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University (2015). I am of Portuguese and Italian descent; my surname, should you decide to use it, is pronounced “My Olly.” I have published articles and reviews in academic journals in the United States and Europe, and I have given invited talks at institutions in the US and abroad, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the University of Edinburgh, and universities and research institutes in Germany, China, Turkey, and Brazil. I have an extensive output as an English–Portuguese translator, having prepared among other things the first Brazilian edition of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. Other than Austen and the eighteenth-century usual suspects, I am a fan of Elizabeth Gaskell, Machado de Assis, William Somerset Maugham, Jorge Luis Borges, and Donald Duck.
For more details, please consult my CV.
Contact
- office: Turlington Hall 4338
- voice: (352) 294-2841
- fax: (352) 392-0860
- Professor Maioli’s website
- email: <rmaiolidossantos@ufl.edu>