Robert Hudson Vincent

I am an Assistant Professor of English at Davidson College, where I teach courses in early British literature and early American literature.

I have published peer-reviewed articles on William Shakespeare, English baroque poetry, the history of science, and settler colonialism in early America, as well as interviews with Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and others.

My book, The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature (Edinburgh University Press, February 2025), argues that early modern English literature was an essential part of the first global aesthetic movement—the baroque. While the baroque remains a foundational concept for most European literary and aesthetic traditions, scholars have largely elided the word from British literary history. Instead of baroque, these critics prefer to use terms like metaphysical, Stuart, and Laudian—terms that emphasize England’s primacy rather than its relations with the world. In response to these Anglocentric approaches, I show how the baroque offers a better way to appreciate the importance of transnational and multilingual relations to the development of English letters.

I am now at work on a second book titled “Carceral Colonialism: Literature and Punishment in Early America.” This project presents a new history of prison literature in early America from the incarceration of Algonquian peoples in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the carceral conditions of plantations in North Carolina. By focusing on literary practices of translation and correction, the book investigates how British settlers developed a new strategy of colonization in America—a strategy I call carceral colonialism.

My research and teaching have been supported by a Mellon Fellowship in English Paleography at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Villa I Tatti Graduate Fellowship for Renaissance Studies, a Derek Bok Center Pedagogy Fellowship, and the Bowdoin Prize for Best Graduate Essay in the English Language at Harvard University.

I have received three Harvard Distinction in Teaching Awards and five Harvard Certificates of Teaching Excellence for courses on William Shakespeare, John Milton, the history of the book, and carceral studies.

I hold a Ph.D. from Harvard University (2020) and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2013), where I was a Morehead-Cain Scholar.

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