Anthony Kemp

My teaching and writing mainly center on the religious and anti-religious aspects of culture, and particularly on how religion transforms into romanticism. I’m also interested in the interrelations between literature and philosophy. A dilettante of many fields, I find it difficult to stick to one period. I’m an Americanist with special interest in the transatlantic 17th century, though I also teach American 19th century and modernism, and, at least on an undergraduate level, classics and medieval. I’m interested in all culture from the most ancient texts to contemporary performance art. My first book, “The Estrangement of the Past,” is about the transformations in the Christian picture of world history from the 3rd century to the beginnning of the 20th, and how the present’s attitude to the past was reversed from identification to estrangement. I have two books in progress, “The Materialist Ideology: Bacon to Sade,” about the extremeties of early materialism, and “The School of the Dead,” a novel of gothic horror (not for reading alone on stormy nights). I am also a collector of medieval swords and a student of their use.