A member of the Lawrence University faculty since 1957, Bertrand Goldgar, professor
of English and the John N. Bergstrom Professor of Humanities, is an internationally
recognized expert on 18th-century political satire and one of the world’s
leading scholars on Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones. Editor of three volumes
in the definitive edition of Fielding’s works, and author of two books
on politics and literature in the 18th century, he recently edited four volumes
of The Grub Street Journal, 1730-1733, containing issues from the first four
years of that weekly satirical newspaper. His essay “The Grub-street
Journal: Construction and Control of its Readership” is scheduled to
appear in Literature, History, and Culture: Essays in Commemoration of
the Life and Work of Simon Varey, edited by Gregg Clingham. In 2002 he was selected
as a contributing editor to a landmark new multi-volume edition of the works
of Jonathan Swift, to be published by Cambridge University Press. His volume,
Swift’s English Political Writing, 1711-1714, will cover Swift’s
literary engagement in the politics of Queen Anne’s England. In October,
he was one of 12 scholars from the United States, France, and the United Kingdom
chosen to address a conference at Yale University commemorating the 250th anniversary
of Henry Fielding’s death, at which he delivered a paper on “Fielding,
Politics, and ‘Men of Genius.’”