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Biography
Robert Markley is Department Head and W. D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English at the University of Illinois and editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. The author of more than eighty articles in eighteenth-century studies, science studies, and digital media, his books include Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford UP, 1988); Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England (Cornell UP, 1993); Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Duke UP, 2005); The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 (Cambridge UP, 2006), and a volume in the Masters of Science Fiction Series, Kim Stanley Robinson (U of Illinois P, 2019). He has coedited with Peter Kitson Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-British Cultural Relations (Boydell and Brewer, 2016). His current book project examines the emergence of understandings of global climate between 1500 and 1850.
Education
A.B. Vassar College
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Awards and Honors
NEH Faulty Fellowship
Society for the Humanities Fellowship, Cornell University
National Center for Supercomputing Applications Fellowship
Beinecke Library Fellowship, Yale University
William Andrews Clark Library Fellowship
Huntington Library Fellowship
Choice Outstanding Academic Book (three awards)
Additional Campus Affiliations
Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
Highlighted Publications
Kim Stanley Robinson. Modern Masters of Science Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-British Cultural Relations (ed. with Peter Kitson). Boydell and Brewer, 2016.
The Far East and the English Imagination 1600-1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Recent Publications
Markley, R. (2023). Defoe and the Pacific. In N. Seager, & J. A. Downie (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe (pp. 544). Oxford University Press.
Markley, R. (2023). Economics. In A. J. Rivero, & G. Justice (Eds.), Daniel Defoe in Context (pp. 305-329). (Literature in Context). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108872140.044
Markley, R. (2023). Moving beyond “Why Mars?”. Science, 380(6646), 697. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh7737
Markley, R. (2022). The Novel and the Environment: Nature, Cultivation, and Alien Ecologies. In Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (pp. 123-138). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110650440-007
Markley, R. (2021). Defoe and the Problem of the East India Company. In S. Clark, & Y. Yoshihara (Eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia (pp. 23-46). (Palgrave Asia-Pacific and Literature in English). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_2