Victoria KAHN

Professor

Email:

vkahn@berkeley.edu

Office:

4317 Dwinelle

Office Hours:

By appointment

Research Areas

Renaissance and early modern literature; early modern political theory.

Biography

Victoria Kahn specializes in Renaissance literature, rhetoric and poetics, early modern political theory, and the history of literary theory. She is the author of Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Cornell, 1985), Machiavellian Rhetoric (Princeton, 1994), and Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton, 2004), and The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago, 2014). A new book, entitled The Trouble with Literature, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2020. (Ph.D., Yale University).

Selected Publications
Courses

Forthcoming: The Trouble with Literature, The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature, Oxford University, fall 2017; Oxford University Press, 2020 Books: The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (University of Chicago Press, 2014; paperback edition 2016). Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-74 (Princeton University Press, 2004; paperback edition, 2016). [This book won the biennial Book Prize of the West Coast British Studies Association in 2005] Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton University Press, 1994) Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1985) Edited Volumes and Journal Issues: Early Modern Secularism, special edited issue of Representations 105 (2009) Mimesis East and West, special edited issue of Representations 94 (2006) Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850, co-edited volume of essays with Neil Saccamano and Daniela Coli (Princeton University Press, 2006), including a co-authored introduction. [This volume was the subject of a conference at the Firpo Foundation in Turin, Italy, in the fall of 2007.] Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, collection of essays co-edited with Lorna Hutson, with a co-authored introduction (Yale University Press, 2001) Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature. A collection of essays on the literary dimension of Machiavelli's work, co-edited with Albert Ascoli (Cornell University Press, 1993) Recent Articles: “Art, Judaism, and the Critique of Fascism in the Work of Ernst Cassirer,” Representations 148 (2019): 114-35 “About Literature,” Know 2 (2017): 237-55 “What Original Sin? Political Theology, the Jewish Question, and the Work of Metaphor,” Telos 178 (2017): 100-120 “Allegory, Poetic Theology, and Enlightenment Aesthetics,” in The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy After Early Modernity, ed. Paul Kottman (Fordham, 2017), 31-54 “Petrarch’s Defense of Poetry in the Secretum,” in The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, ed. Unn Falkied and Albert Ascoli (Cambridge, 2015), 100-110 “Hobbes and the Science of Metaphor,” in Scientific Statesmanship, Governance and the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Kyriakos N. Demetriou and Antis Loizides (Routledge, 2015), 85-100 “Revisiting Agathocles,” Review of Politics 75 (2013): 557-72; partially reprinted in the third Norton Critical Edition of The Prince, ed. Wayne Rebhorn (2018)

In recent years, I have taught the following graduate courses in the departments of Comparative Literature and English: History of Literary Theory; Idols and Ideology (a history of early modern iconoclasm and its relation to modern theories of ideology critique); Introduction to the Renaissance (with Timothy Hampton in Comparative Literature and French); The Renaissance before the Secular (with Ethan Shagan in History); Introduction to Comparative Literature; Milton and the English Civil War; Seventeenth-Century English Literature; Enlightenment and Critique (survey of the European Enlightenment in relation to modern debates about secularism, democratic thinking, and the rise of the aesthetic). During the 2020-21 academic year, I hope to teach Introduction to Literary Theory and, for Comparative Literature, Tragedy and Trauerspiel (focusing on Walter Benjamin's Trauerspiel book and early modern tragedy).

Please note that these are courses in the Department of Comparative Literature and do not include those in other departments.

201 & 215 (F08), 201 (F10), 258 (Sp11), 201 & 215 (F11), 201 & 215 (F12), 155 (F13), 200 (F15), 250 (Sp17), 256 (F17), 215 (Sp18), 215 & 250 (F18), 258 (F19).