Stanford Humanities Center
James Wood is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Stanford University. He received a BA in English and History, a BA (Hons) in English and an MA in English from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research interests include moral philosophy, genre studies and contact literature.
SHC Project
"Anecdote and Enlightenment, 1710-1790"
Wood's dissertation, Anecdote and Enlightenment, 1710-1790 argues that the anecdote became a vital intellectual tool in the British Enlightenment, playing a central role in the rethinking of human nature and human history over the long eighteenth century. Anecdote and Enlightenment gathers a large archive of texts, including philosophical treatises and popular journals, novels and anecdote collections, travel narratives and biographies in order to investigate how anecdotes helped reshape humanistic knowledge over the eighteenth century.
