Faculty Profile
Jacob Sider Jost
Associate Professor of English (2011)
Contact Information
East College Room 306
717-254-8950
Bio
I am a teacher and scholar of literature, focused on the British eighteenth century. At Dickinson I teach courses about the epic, Shakespeare, the early British novel, eighteenth-century poetry and drama, and fairy stories from Spenser to the Grimms. I am the author of two monographs, Prose Immortality, 1711-1819 (2015), and Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano (2020), both from the University of Virginia Press. I have also published essays on Shakespeare, Shaftesbury, Defoe, Hume, Johnson, Proust, and other figures. I am currently writing a history of life-writing in eighteenth-century Britain for Oxford University Press.
Education
- B.A., Goshen College, 2002
- B.A., University of Oxford, 2005
- M.A., 2009
- Ph.D., Harvard University, 2011
2025-2026 Academic Year
Fall 2025
ENGL 341 English Literature: 1660-1800
Canonical authors and marginal voices of the long eighteenth century. Plagues, fires, invasions, fashion, theology, flirtation, lexicography, heavy drinking, slavery, rebellion, municipal sanitation, love. Pepys, Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Addison, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Wheatley, the sarcastic works of teenage Austen.
ENGL 403 Meth/Models of Lit Schol
This course prepares students to write a senior thesis by exploring key questions and methods in literary scholarship. Students in this seminar will pursue intensive reading, writing and discussion designed to: (1) strengthen their grasp of the history and current configuration of literary studies and related fields; (2) help them frame and begin to pursue the questions that will motivate their senior theses; and (3) hone their critical self-awareness as readers and writers.