Robert DeMaria Jr.

A specialist in eighteenth-century British literature, Robert DeMaria, Jr. is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College, where he has taught since 1975. He served as chair of his department from 1987 to1990 and from 2001 to 2007. He has also served the college as the director of two institutional grants and as the coordinator of its decennial review.

Samuel Johnson has been the main subject of Robert DeMaria’s research since 1977 when he began work on Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986). Subsequently, he published The Life of Samuel Johnson (1993), Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (1997), and numerous essays on Johnson. As an editor, Robert DeMaria has also focused on Johnson. With Gwin Kolb he edited Johnson on the English Language, volume 18 in the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (2005), and in 2007 he became the general editor of the Edition. He is also the editor of the Johnsonian News Letter. Outside the Johnsonian world, he has edited several anthologies and the Penguin edition of Gulliver’s Travels. He is currently editing, with two colleagues, the Blackwell Companion to British Literature.

In addition to a Guggenheim fellowship, Robert DeMaria has held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto as well as lesser awards from the NEH and ACLS. In 2009-10 he was the Katherine F. Pantzer Fellow in Descriptive Bibliography at the Houghton Library at Harvard University.