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Ph.D., Tufts University; M.A., State University of New York, Buffalo; B.M., Vanderbilt University
David Palumbo, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the English Department at Emmanuel College. His area of specialty is eighteenth-century British Literature, though he teaches a range of classes that cover different literary periods and global perspectives. Dr. Palumbo challenges students in his classes to generate informed and critical perspectives on a variety of traditional and multimedia texts, and he encourages his students to use advanced reading and writing skills to communicate those perspectives to different audiences. His professional interests connect to his pedagogical goals.
Full-length articles:
"Raillery and Satire in the Bathurst-Swift Correspondence.” Swift Studies, vol. 36, 2021
From ‘Laugh[ing]’ to ‘Rayl[ing]’ with a ‘Few Friends’: A Modest Proposal as Private Satire.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 59, no. 3, 2018.
"Mary Wollstonecraft, Jonathan Swift, and the Passion in Reading." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 51, no. 3, 2011.
"Death Becomes Her: Figuration and Decay in Swift's Birthday Poems to Stella." The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 51, no. 4, 2010.
Selected Conference Presentations:
“Jonathan Swift in Jane Collier’s The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting.” East Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Gettysburg, PA, Fall 2019.
“Mrs. Pendarves and Dr. Swift.” East Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In Washington D.C., Fall 2017.
“Jonathan Swift in the ‘Birthday Poems’ of Mary Barber and Laetitia Pilkington.” East Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In Fredericksburg, VA, Fall 2016.
“Putting ‘Lemon and Sugar’ in Swift’s Tub: Laetitia Pilkington’s Satiric Strategy in her Memoirs.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Pittsburgh, PA, Spring 2016.
“Raillery and Debt in Jonathan Swift’s Letters.” East Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Newark, DE, Fall 2015.
"Satiric Alenation: Friendship and Isolation in Swift's Circle"-Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Middletown, CT, Fall 2012.
Dr. Palumbo researches and writes about how Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels and one of the greatest satirists in the English language, used his ironic perspective on human life to communicate with a number of women during his lifetime. But Dr. Palumbo complicates the value of this playfully aggressive perspective by introducing responses from a number of women, including Laetitia Pilkington and Mary Wollstonecraft, to Swift’s writings. These written responses, many of them interpersonal letters not intended for publication, show women actively responding to and modifying Swift’s irony as they create a space in which private rhetorical strategies enliven a world of gender-inflected politics.
Dr. Palumbo’s most recent publications attend to the ways Swift adjusted his infamous public satiric perspectives to fit the more local political concerns of Ireland after becoming Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He has also started a research project that investigates how the Boston poet, Phillis Wheatley, personalizes a set of poetic forms to write her way from enslavement to freedom.
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