I was born and grew up in Los Angeles. Since my undergraduate days at UCLA I have been interested in what we now call "early modern literature," especially literature of the English civil war years and Restoration (c. 1640-1700). My graduate work was directed by Barbara Lewalski at Brown University and I began teaching at Washington University, St. Louis in 1969. At the time, John Pocock taught the history of political thought at Washington University and I received what I thought of then, and continue to think of, as a crucial postgraduate education in his seminars. Pocock's work in the history of political thought opened for me a way to understand relations between politics and literary culture, and I have worked along that axis for a number of years, writing on Marvell, Milton, and Dryden, and, more broadly, on Restoration culture and politics. My recent interests include the habits and protocols of reading in early modern England, the history of aesthetics, and early modern biography, and again with an aim of situating all of these cultural institutions and practices within political and social history. At Washington University I hold the Stanley Elkin Professorship in the Humanities and am Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of History. I direct the Literature and History Program; the Mellon Postdoctoral Program, "Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry"; and the Mellon Summer Dissertation Seminar Program. I have directed research seminars at the Folger Shakespeare Library; held a visiting professorship at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan; held research awards from NEH, ACLS, the Taft Foundation, the American Bibliographical Society, and the Mellon Foundation; visiting research appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Clark Library, and the Huntington Library, and in the spring of 2003 was British Academy Visiting Lecturer at the Universities of Liverpool and Aberdeen. Monographs and edited volumes: The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, ed. (forthcoming, 2004); Reading, Politics, and Society in Early Modern England, ed. with Kevin Sharpe (2003); John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany, ed. (2001), The Selected Poems of John Dryden, ed. with David Bywaters (2001); Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, ed. with Kevin Sharpe (1998); The Cambridge Companion to English Literature: 1650-1740, ed. (1998); Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (1993); Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. with Kevin Sharpe (1987); Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (1984); Dryden's Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (1972).

• L14 494: Milton (SP2007)
• L14 515: Seminar: The Seventeenth Century (SP2006)
• L13 515: Graduate Seminar in Poetry (FL2008)
• L14 3725: Topics in Renaissance Literature (FL2008)
• L14 413: 17th Century English Literature: 1603-60 (FL2006)
• L14 3322: Reading in the Renaissance: Texts and Practices (FL2006)