BA (Memorial), MA (Queen’s), PhD (University of Ottawa)
Dr. Tim Clarke is an assistant professor in the Foundation Year Program. He received a BA in English and Historical Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2011, an MA in English at Queen’s University in 2012, and a PhD in English at the University of Ottawa in 2018, where his doctoral research explored the tangled legacies of Spinoza’s philosophy among American literary writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. His research focuses on encounters between literature and philosophy, especially literary modernisms and philosophical reflections on vitalism, death, and affect.
Dr. Clarke’s current project, tentatively titled Morbid Vitalism: Life and Decadence in Modernist Literature, conceives of literary modernism as the site of a counter-intuitive synthesis of alternately vitalist and death-oriented thought that he traces in part to modernism’s inheritance and development of the decadent tradition. Dr. Clarke has recently published on Spinozan affect theory, failure, and the fear of death in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood. He is also the co-translator of numerous texts by the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos.
Selected Publications
- “Cosmopolis and the Colony: E. Pauline Johnson’s Strategies of Association.” Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures. Forthcoming.
- “All Things Go to Decay: Decadence in the Early Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 73, no. 1, 2025, pp. 35-45.
- “The Consolations of Decadence in John Fante’s Ask the Dust.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 47, no. 4, 2024, pp. 126-43.
- “Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Logic of Decadence.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 11, no. 2, 2023, pp. 333-60.
- “After a Decadent Fashion: E. Pauline Johnson and the Staging of Indigeneity.” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2023.
- Review of Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange, by Rebecca Colesworthy. Journal of Modern Literature vol. 45, no. 3, 2022, pp. 180-83.
- “Morbid Vitalism: Death, Decadence, and Spinozism in Barnes’s Nightwood.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 67, no. 2, 2021, pp. 163-90.
- Review of Italian Futurism and the Machine, by Katia Pizzi. The Modernist Review, modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2019/09/30/book-review-italian-futurism-and-the-machine/ (September, 2019).
- Translation of Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience. By Milton Santos, Springer (2017, co-translated and co-edited with Lucas Melgaço).
Research Interests
Literary modernisms, 19th- and 20th-century American literature, decadence, vitalism, affect, literary and philosophical reflections on death, continental philosophy
Current Projects
Dr. Clarke is presently researching the logic of decadence in nineteenth-century American literature and the entanglements of decadence and vitalist thought in literary modernism.
