About

Elliott Visconsi writes about and teaches  sixteenth, seventeenth and a bit of eighteenth century English and American literature. His first book, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, was published in April 2008 by Cornell University Press. This book describes the later seventeenth-century literary transformation of equity from a principle of legal interpretation into an ethos of deliberative citizenship. Treating authors such as Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, John Dryden, Henry Neville, Aphra Behn, and Daniel Defoe, this book demonstrates the manner in which the newly public enterprise of serious literature helps to create the conditions in which political liberalism can thrive.

Currently he is near completion of his second book—”The Invention of Civil Religion: The Literature of Church and State in Postrevolutionary England and America”—which describes the intellectual and cultural history of the principle of separation of church and state between 1649 and 1791. This study suggests that literary culture plays a deeply influential role in the development of a constitutional sensibility in which the robust separation of church and state is understood to be best for government and for religion. Moreover, the project argues that it is in the domains of the literary that the concept of “civil religion” emerges.

The next project, tentatively titled “Citizenship Before Rights: Shakespearean Belonging,” is a study of the early modern  literary mediation of political belonging in the years before the age of revolutions, which promulgate  sweeping and modern dignitary rights of citizenship. Focusing on the plays of Shakespeare, this study tracks structuring concepts include asylum and refugeeism, denizenship, superfluity and statelessness (including slavery), “household” dependency relations, and the moral hazards attached to religious pluralism.

Other work in progress focuses on the persistence of race in contemporary English and EU debates about religious defamation and interference with religious speech.

His work has been supported by an ACLS Fellowship, a Macmillan Center Director’s Award for Junior Faculty, and other awards. He also enjoys working with the Connecticut Humanities Council on a variety of programs, including law & literature seminars for the general public and Shakespeare seminars for Connecticut judges.