{"id":8,"date":"2012-03-18T00:47:27","date_gmt":"2012-03-18T04:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/facultyviscoustemplate\/?page_id=8"},"modified":"2026-06-30T13:15:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T17:15:39","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/","title":{"rendered":"About me (revised June 2026)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am an associate professor in the English Department<\/a> at Temple University<\/a>, specializing in English and Scottish literature during what scholars now refer to as the Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1832), which includes the Restoration, the eighteenth century, and the Romantic era.\u00a0 I am also interested in discussions about the state of the academy and the value of the humanities, organizing academic labor (I served from 2017-21 as President of TAUP<\/a>, the labor union representing 2500 faculty, librarians, and academic professionals at Temple and remain active in my union), community-based learning, and the literature of Philadelphia.\u00a0 I teach courses ranging from the introduction to the English major to surveys of British literature to more advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in the Long Eighteenth Century.\u00a0 I established a Summer Study Abroad program in London in 2013, reprised in 2015 and 2017, with Scotland added in 2022.<\/p>\n

I am currently serving as Secretary of the Temple Faculty Senate<\/a>, Senior Vice President of the Robert Burns Association of North America<\/a> , and on the Executive Committee, The International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures<\/a>\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

I am laboring on a book with the working title, Narratives of Value:\u00a0 What the Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Romanticism Have to Teach Us About the Value of the Humanities Now. <\/em>It offers new answers to the current tide of damaging attacks on the humanities.\u00a0 Recent defenses focus on the decline after the flush years following World War II into a corporate, STEM-driven university (Harpham; Donoghue) or go back only to the founding of the German research university in the early 19th<\/sup> century (Readings; Small).\u00a0 While helpful, these accounts limit themselves by starting after the separation of the humanities from the social and natural sciences that has too often made their value claims mutually unintelligible, especially the willfully miscast contest between the humanities and economics (Mehta and Newfield).\u00a0 Narratives of Value<\/em> begins instead with the Scottish Enlightenment and specifically with Adam Smith (chapter 1), who offers pluralistic and flexible accounts of value as he unpacks the overlaps and conflicts between moral philosophy, economics, and aesthetics.\u00a0 Yet, as the figure of the war-dancing African in his work reveals, his challenges to Eurocentric and other flawed hierarchies of value are hobbled by his view of race at this early moment in its modern formation.<\/p>\n

Both the strengths and the occlusions of these narratives of value shape the ensuing chapters, which focus on the work of Robert Burns, Joanna Baillie, and Walter Scott.<\/p>\n

“Gangrel Bodies” (chapter 2) shows how the body, which has emerged as central in humanistic studies over the past few decades, acts as a nexus of narratives of value that complicate the polite standard Smith and other Enlightenment literati attempt to uphold, whether in the unruly, eroticized, laboring bodies of Burns’ poems and songs, as he seeks to “embod[y] in rhyme” his vision of a more socially-mobile and democratic body politic that refuses the reductiveness of market value even as it acknowledges its logics and even has room to value non-human creatures.\u00a0 Or the visible\u00a0<\/em>hands of Baillie’s plays, their ubiquity revealed by computational analysis, drawing on her knowledge of the body derived from her uncles and brother, among the most eminent doctors of their day, revising Smith\u2019s central moral idea of sympathy and central narrative irony of the Invisible Hand, questioning their reduction of women to unreflective objects of aesthetic delectation and insisting that despite the move to larger theaters that make her narratives of how emotions emerge in her experimental Plays on the Passions, <\/em>she does not want her work relegated to the silent, solitary world of “closet drama.”\u00a0 Or the “gangrel bodies” of Scott’s fools, blind fiddlers, and “gypsy” women who complicate a polite idea of a modern body politic, as does the interestingly vulnerable bodies of his Waverley heroes, who register the violent unevenness of the biopolitics inscribed into the influential stories he tells of the emerging nation-state.<\/p>\n

“Stories of Vocation” (chapter 3) picks up on Smith’s fundamental drive to “better our condition” as well as his illuminating narratives of the irrational “lottery” that drives his students to seek professional eminence, a tension between the value of higher education as\u00a0Bildung\u00a0<\/em>and vocational attainment that continues to dominate discourse around the value of the humanities, with narrowly-defined vocational pursuits sadly and perilously displacing other modes of understanding.\u00a0 Burns offers a foundational though vexed example of the Scottish “lad o’ pairts” who ascends from humble origins to eminence as Scotland’s bard.\u00a0 But his struggles in life with a status hierarchy disinclined to make room for him and especially his drive for “independence” and after his death, an ill-founded reputation for excessive drinking shows the limits of this narrative.\u00a0 By tracing his dual attempts to establish his vocation as a poet, called to the bardic estate by his muse, Coila in\u00a0The Vision,\u00a0<\/em>and the tension between that narrative and his punishing toil as a ploughman and then, thanks to a limited success with finding patronage, as a servant of the state as a tax collector, a position in a sort of proto-meritocracy, we see how Burns’ attempt to put his humanistic knowledge to work is challenged but not defeated by reductive economic, moral and aesthetic ideas of value.\u00a0 Baillie encounters parallel challenges, among them the tendency to turn women into muses (as with Burns) rather than allowing them space to be authors.\u00a0 In her long and productive career as a playwright, poet, and songwriter based in London, she refuses the conventional narrative of the woman-as-wife-and-mother, insisting instead on a network of friendship and kinship to support her labors as an artist seeking to produce new and valuable knowledge about the effect of passions on the subject and society.\u00a0\u00a0Gender roles figure differently for Scott, who\u00a0 revalues novel writing from a sign of effeminizing \u201cDelilahs of the Imagination\u201d to a respectable profession providing stories for young, male novel readers to safely indulge in while learning how to be proper subjects of a modern state and economy. \u00a0Yet Scott\u2019s own bankruptcy, a result of his enthusiastic speculation in new technologies, offers a cautionary tale about the limits of such speculations.<\/p>\n

A deeper inquiry into the attraction to and perils of systems is the focus of Chapter 4, “Systems and Their Discontents.”\u00a0 Arguing against recent accounts of Smith as a systematic philosopher, I focus on the ways in which he also points out the danger of systematic thinking to skew value judgments by reducing them to what fits whatever systems we construct, a seductiveness to which Smith himself occasionally falls prey.\u00a0 A similar approach informs Burns’ own most influential systematic work, the collection and editing of Scottish songs for the two major works that occupy most of his poetic labors in the latter half of his short career.\u00a0 One of the most consequential efforts in humanistic knowledge-construction during the Romantic era and beyond–the canon of Scottish songs is unimaginable without The Scots Musical Museum <\/em>and A Select Collection of Scottish Songs–<\/em>Burns considers but refuses a systematic approach to song collection that would<\/p>\n

The advantage of drawing on these rich and flexible narratives of value are illustrated in chapter 5, which surveys the current state of the humanities with a nod to my own experiences: vocational (research into personal statements for professional schools); global (teaching and researching in Nepal and at a \u201cnational minorities university\u201d); and local (work on my home institution\u2019s vexed relationship with North Philadelphia). \u00a0The result:\u00a0 A defense of the humanities employing the legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment to insist on its moral, aesthetic, and economic utility without reducing it to use as constructed by the market.<\/p>\n

A version of the chapter on Adam Smith was published in English Literary History <\/em>and won the 2024-25 James L. Clifford award from the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies for “an article that presents an outstanding study of some aspect of eighteenth-century culture, interesting to any eighteenth-century specialist, regardless of discipline.”<\/p>\n

I am the editor of Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd\u00a0<\/em>(1725; 1729) as the first volume in The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>which was published by Edinburgh University Press in the Spring of 2022.\u00a0 The Collected Works <\/em>\u00a0received a grant of \u00a31 million\u00a0<\/em>from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.\u00a0\u00a0The Gentle Shepherd\u00a0<\/em>is Ramsay’s best-known work; it went through over 100 printings prior to the 18th century and various versions were staged frequently throughout the UK.\u00a0 Ramsay himself is a central figure in laying down the conceptual and institutional ground-work of the Scottish Enlightenment.\u00a0 My current understanding of Ramsay’s view of pastoral and his remediation of proverbs and other traditional genres can be found in an essay published in 2018 in\u00a0The Scottish Literary Review<\/em>, “‘Hodden-Gray’: Pastoral, Enlightenment Re-Mediation, and The Proverbial Allan Ramsay” and another, “Some Pastoral Improvement in\u00a0The Gentle Shepherd<\/em>:\u00a0 Mediation, Remediation, and Minority” (Studies in Scottish Literature,\u00a0<\/em>2021).<\/span><\/p>\n

I am also in the early stages of directing a Digital Humanities site on The Beggar’s Opera <\/em><\/a>(1728) by John Gay, an even bigger hit in British eighteenth-century theater and one of the most influential texts in British literature, sparking adaptations from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera <\/em>(1928) to Opera Wonyosi <\/em>by the Nobel prize-winning author Wole Soyinka (1977) to Stephen Jeffreys’\u00a0The Convict’s Opera\u00a0<\/em>(2008).\u00a0 At the core of the site will be a scholarly edition of\u00a0The Beggar’s Opera\u00a0<\/em>in TEI-XML and MEI-XML that will be enriched by audio and video clips of various performances, a glossary, and contextualizing essays on topics ranging from political satire in the 1720s to ballads and ballad collection in the era.\u00a0 There will also be a data-driven project mapping editions and performances over space and time, which inquires into the relationship between the stage and the page.\u00a0 The site aims to be a proof-of-concept for others interested in bringing musical theater into a digital environment. \u00a0 My collaborators and I have now posted the pilot site.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

In January of 2025, we mounted the premiere of\u00a0The Beggar’s Trio<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>comprising selections from The Beggar’s Opera<\/em>, Brecht\/Hauptmann\/Weill’s\u00a0The Threepenny Opera<\/em> (1928) and Latouche\/Ellington’s Beggar’s Holiday\u00a0<\/em>(1946).\u00a0 I served as the dramatug, co-producer, and play-cobbler (playwright is too elevated a term, I think, for my labors).\u00a0 It starred students from Temple’s Voice and Opera program, with musical direction by Steven Gross, stage direction by Kyle Metzger, and co-production and guidance from Prof. Marcus DeLoach, and received support from the Office of the Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs, the Vice President for Research, the Provost’s Office, and the Dean of the College for Performing and Cinematic Arts.\u00a0 The play will be reprised on May 2, 2025 as part of the Lanter Theater’s Spotlight serie<\/a>s.<\/p>\n

Many of my scholarly interests coalesced in Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from The Restoration to the New Criticism<\/a> <\/em>(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).\u00a0 \u00a0Focusing on the motives behind and the effects of the sustained interest by elite British writers in popular songs, it revises historicist accounts of the establishment of what we know now as the canon of English literature. While ballads allow elite authors to draw tendentious distinctions between high and low and idealize both the folk and the literary, they also use ballads to imagine a common world in opposition to modes of literary commodification and the overpowering of readerly agency.\u00a0 Among the figures I consider and continue to be interested in are better-known authors such as John Gay, Joseph Addison, William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Felicia Hemans, as well as lesser-known figures like Thomas D’Urfey, Allan Ramsay, eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholars and progressive educational theorists in the early twentieth century.\u00a0 Tracing the appropriation of ballads by elite authors puts me into touch with other topics that interest me, including nationalism, lyric, the history of English as a discipline, and the relationship between literary form and history.<\/p>\n

Since the publication of my book, I have continued to work on the relationship between elite literature and various forms of the vernacuar during the Long Eighteenth Century, contributing to The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism<\/em> <\/a>(Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800<\/a> <\/em>(Ashgate, 2010),\u00a0 and\u00a0A Companion to Scottish Literature<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Wiley-Blackwell, 2024)<\/p>\n

A pre-history of sorts to the history of value I attempt to narrate in my current book project can be found in an article recently published in The Scottish Literary Review<\/em>, Spring\/Summer 2012 “Second-Sighted Scot: Allan Ramsay and the South Sea Bubble.”<\/p>\n

I have also built on prior work on Shakespeare and popular song as a contributor to two volumes, one in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>(Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry <\/em><\/a>(Oxford University Press, 2013) .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am an associate professor in the English Department at Temple University, specializing in English and Scottish literature during what scholars now refer to as the Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1832), which includes the Restoration, the eighteenth century, and the Romantic era.\u00a0 I am also interested in discussions about the state of the academy and the… Continue Reading About me (revised June 2026)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":798,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/798"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8\/revisions\/432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/snewmanbio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}