Faculty
Neil Chudgar
Assistant Professor of English
Ph.D. University of Chicago
B.A. University of Pittsburgh
Old Main 202, (651) 696-6641
Email: nchudgar-at-macalester.edu
Neil Chudgar comes to Macalester from the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in English literature. At that institution he taught widely, most recently in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. He earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh.
In his scholarship and in his teaching, Professor Chudgar aims to explore the ways in which literary texts help give their writers and readers the feeling of being in contact with the reality of the tangible world. He is currently at work on a book about the sense of touch in early eighteenth-century British literature, paying particular attention to the tactile preoccupations of Locke, Defoe, Pope, and Swift. He is also in the early stages of another project, which will investigate a particular mode of modern aesthetic experience that might be called, for want of a better word, the cute—a distinctive form of feeling that seems to have been born in the later eighteenth century and has been a powerful force in Western culture ever since. Both of these projects are about how literary language has helped modern people stay in touch with the sorts of tangible objects that other languages (like those of the sciences or philosophy) tend to imperil or forget.
Fall 2009 Courses
Areas of Study
- Eighteenth-century British literature
- Poetry and poetics
- Literary theory and criticism
- Modernities (early and late)
- Psychoanalysis, particularly object-relations
- Therapeutic reading
- Pedagogy
Publications
- "Swift’s Gentleness,” ELH, forthcoming
Recent Papers
- “Smooth or Rough: The Ethics of Form in Augustan Poetry,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, December 2009
- “Swift’s Gentleness,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Annual Meeting, Portland, March 2008
- “Wordsworth as Kitsch” International Conference on Romanticism (ICR) Annual Meeting, Towson University and Loyola College, October 2007
Awards
- Whiting Doctoral Fellowship, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation (2007-2009)
- Norman Maclean Teaching Fellowship, University of Chicago (2006 – 2007)
- Karen Dinal Award for Excellence in Teaching Academic Writing, University of Chicago (2004)
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