Kevin Van Anglen

Kevin Van Anglen’s main areas of interest are American literature to 1865, European-American literary relations, religion and literature, and literature and the environment.  He teaches undergraduate courses in all these areas as well as courses in American literature 1865-1950 and British literature to 1670.  (These include EN 220, 221, 322, 538, 539, 545, 546, and 579.)   He serves as an editor of the Princeton Thoreau Edition, for which he has edited Thoreau’s Translations of ancient Greek and Sanscrit texts, and helped edit a dozen other series volumes; the author of a book on Milton’s New England reception; editor of a collection of Thoreau’s quotations; and coeditor of an interdisciplinary anthology on the environment.

He has also written or have forthcoming articles on the early nineteenth-century American reception of Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Samuel Johnson; aspects of Thoreau’s short nature essays (“the excursions”); and the scholarly neglect or misunderstanding of religion’s role in American culture.  He is currently coediting and contributing to an essay collection on the classics and Anglo-American romanticism; planning another essay collection for the Thoreau Society to commemorate Thoreau’s bicentennial in 2017; and finishing a book on Hawthorne, Milton, and the idea of aristocracy in New England.  Van Anglen is the Keeper of F. O. Matthiessen’s library at Harvard; coeditor of the journal, Religion and the Arts; and just finished six years on the Thoreau Society’s Board of Directors (which gave him its Walter Harding Distinguished Service Award for 2012).