Alvarez, David P., Ph.D.
David Alvarez received his B.A. from U.C. Davis, double majoring in Comparative Literature and Philosophy, and his Ph.D in English from Cornell University.
As a Fulbright scholar this year at Ghent University, Belgium, he is finishing a book manuscript on “Imagining Global Religion: Secularity, Religious Toleration, and Empire in the English Enlightenment.” Alvarez has published internationally on eighteenth-century English literature and philosophy, focusing on religious toleration, aesthetics, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. With Prof. Alison Conway, he edited a book collection of essays, Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830 (University of Toronto Press, 2019).
He teaches a wide range of courses on Enlightenment literature and philosophy, focusing on travel narratives and the early novel, religious tolerance, satire, and economics and literature. He has also taught introductory courses on boredom and coffee (these are two different courses), as well as a popular First-Year Seminar: “Be Yourself!”
His favorite book is Gulliver’s Travels.
Having held visiting academic positions in India, Germany, Italy, and Belgium, Alvarez led a successful effort in collaboration with faculty members, administrators, and staff to create DePauw’s new Global Studies Fellows Program.
His most recent peer-reviewed publication is an article on “Religious Toleration” in The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English (2023). Some presentations of his scholarship in 2024 include:
- “The Colonial Context of Carolina in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Aesthetics and Ethics," an invited talk for “Radical Aesthetics: A Symposium on New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Harvard University, May 3, 2024
- “The Climate of Commerce: Joseph Addison’s Religious Thermometer”, an invited talk for a conference on “Climate and Crisis: 1660-1820,” University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, April 19-20, 2024
- “Imagining Modern Religion through Islam: Staging Simon Ockley’s The Conquest of Syria, Persia and Aegypt by the Saracens (1708) in John Hughes’ The Siege of Damascus (1719),” annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto, Canada, April 4-6, 2024
- “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Bad Baroque: Targeting Hapsburg Frauen-Schiessen,” annual conference of the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of San Francisco, February 16, 2024