424 Santa Teresa Street
Humanities Center
Stanford, CA 94305-4015

bender@stanford.edu
(650) 723-3052 (voice)
(650) 723-1895 (fax)

Research Interests
18th-century British and European literature, visual arts, and literary theory

John Bender is director of the Stanford Humanities Center, professor of English and Comparative Literature, and research affiliate of the Forum on Contemporary Europe. His research and teaching focus on the 18th century in England and France. His special concerns include the relationship of literature to visual arts, to philosophy and science, as well as to the sociology of literature and critical theory.

His most recent book is Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, which was awarded the Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1987. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Piranesi, Hogarth, Hume, Goldsmith, Blake, Godwin, and on theoretical issues including fictionality and scientific inquiry.