Robert Mitchell Director of Graduate Studies/Associate Professor of English and Faculty in the Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy; Affiliated Faculty in Women's Studies
Office Location: 322 (DGS office hours: 316) Allen Building
Office Phone: (919) 668-2547
Email Address: rmitch@duke.edu
Teaching (Fall, 2009):
- English 90as.01, Readings in genre
Synopsis
- Allen 306, MW 11:40 AM-12:55 PM
- Office Hours:
- DGS Office Hours: Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:30-2:30 pm
Class office hours: Mondays, 2:30-3:30
- Education and Interests:
- Ph.D., University of Washington
- British Literature of the Romantic Era; Romanticism; 18th Century Literature; Literature and Science
- Robert Mitchell is interested in relationships between the sciences and prose and poetry of the Romantic era, and in the role of theories of emotional communication (for example, sympathy and identification) in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era philosophy and literature. He is also interested in contemporary intersections between information technologies, genetics, and commerce, especially as these have been played out in the legal, literary, and artistic spheres. He has published articles about the role of sympathy and systems in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, the vision of science in Percy Bysshe Shelley's early poetry, and Coleridge's interest in the sacrifices demanded by systems, among other topics. He has published a monograph entitled Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (London: Routledge, 2007), and is co-author of both Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 2006) and the DVD-ROM Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information (U of Pennsylvania P, 2008). He is also co-editor of two collections of essays--Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002) and Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003)--and co-editor of the book series In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science (University of Washington Press). Bioart and the Vitality of Media, a short monograph on contemporary art that employs biological materials, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press. He is currently working on a monograph on the role of experimentation in Romantic-era vitalist science and literature.
- Representative Publications
(More Publications)
- with Helen Burgess, Phillip Thurtle. Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. (DVD-ROM) [html]
- Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity. Routledge, 2007. [102-8880685-5627335]
- with C. Waldby. Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 2006. [102-8880685-5627335]
- with P. Thurtle. Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information. Routledge, Winter 2003. [104-7461896-1670304]
- with P. Thurtle. "‘The Acme Novelty Library’: Comic Books, Repetition, and the Return of the New." Configurations 15.3 (2007): 267–297.
- "‘Beings that have existence only in ye minds of men’: State Finance and the Origins of the Collective Imagination." The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 49.2 (2008): 117-139.
- "Sacrifice, Individuation, and the Economics of Genomics." Literature and Medicine 26.1 (Spring, 2007): 126-158.
- "The Fane of Tescalipoca: S. T. Coleridge on the Sacrificial Economies of Systems in the 1790s." Studies in Romanticism 46.1 (2007): 105-27.
- More Information:
Faculty: Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy
Affiliated Faculty: Women's Studies
