About

Courtney Weiss Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and an Associate Editor at History & Theory. Her research and teaching focus on the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of Britain in the long eighteenth century. Her first book, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (University of Virginia Press, 2016), won the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. She is a newly appointed editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. C, The Restoration and Eighteenth Century, working with volume co-editor James Noggle and the rest of the editorial team on a substantively revised 11th edition. She is also writing Sound Stuff: Words in Enlightenment Philosophy and Poetics, a history of ideas about poetic sound (including rhyme, onomatopoeia, pun, and polyptoton). The project explores how poets but also philosophers and natural philosophers understood the material forms that words took.