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Biography

Dr. Galbraith’s literary and cultural interests in eighteenth-century Britain include satire, Augustan humanism, print culture, amatory fiction, the domestic novel, and the transition from neoclassical to Gothic aesthetics. His research focuses on the ways in which authors negotiate changes resulting from the shift to a market-based economy and help contribute, ultimately, to a more ethical and autonomous conception of literature. His work also looks at how authors and printers engage with the process of secularization, with the goal of gaining greater insight into the ethics and politics of social change and the difficulty of maintaining religious identity in pluralistic societies.

Dr. Galbraith's scholarship focuses on the contentious discourse of obedience in print culture of the Restoration and eighteenth century. Although the government frequently used prepublication licensing to enforce compliance and silence dissent, submission to authority flourished as a subject of debate in broadsides, sixpenny tracts, satire, drama, and early novels. Differences of opinion led to frequent controversy, prompting a flurry of texts that at times seemed riotous in its effects. These debates, which stemmed from the project to rebuild society following the destruction of the Civil War, drive his research questions: First, what textual and literary innovations did authors develop in their attempts to restore obedience among the reading public? Second, what does it mean when certain authors choose to reject what others tout as freedoms, refusing to embrace the advances of modernity?

Education (2)

Indiana University: Ph. D., 18th Century Literature

Boston University: M. A., Creative Writing

Areas of Expertise and Research Interests (2)

British Literature

18th Century Literature

Links (1)

• Department of English

Academics and Published Research (2)

Publications and Presentations

Dr. Galbraith has delivered conference papers on John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, the politics of eighteenth-century theater, at the University of Chicago and meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, has presented a chapter of his dissertation at the Harvard University graduate student colloquium, and was invited to lecture at the History of the Book seminar at Indiana University. He was also awarded a Newberry Library Consortium grant to conduct research at the Folger Shakespeare Library. His book reviews and creative work have appeared in Books and Culture, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Florida Review, AGNI, and Religion in the Age of Enlightenment. Currently, he has an article forthcoming at the journal Restoration. His critical essay, “When Slavery Becomes Resistance: Questions of Obedience in Dryden’s Don Sebastian,” is part of an edited collection currently under review.

Current Writing Projects

Dr. Galbraith's current book project—titled "Restoring Obedience: The Afterlife of the Reformation from Dryden to Johnson"—examines how Restoration and eighteenth-century authors wrestled with the Lutheran principles of passive obedience and non-resistance that distinguished efforts to institute the Reformation in Tudor England. The reappearance of this scriptural mode of obedience in the eighteenth century, and the responses it provoked, set the terms for some of the central authors of the period, including John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Johnson. In the work of these authors, depictions of obedience serve as hinge-texts that look both backward and forward. Specifically, his project argues that the discourse of obedience provides insight into secularity’s influence on religious belief. The term “secularity” has served since the Enlightenment to describe the waning of religious belief and its removal from public space. In "A Secular Age" (2007), Charles Taylor introduces a more reflexive sense of the term to focus on the shifting conditions of belief. In Taylor’s conjectural history, although religious belief once constituted the default choice beyond which men and women did not venture, it ramified during the Reformation to provide individuals with an increasing range of options. Because belief was no longer axiomatic, the survival of theism required a process of public argumentation. It is this publicity, he argues, that separates the initial manifestation of Reformation Christianity in sixteenth-century England from its recovery and espousal two centuries later. The definition of secularity as publicity is useful for examining how belief continued to adapt and even thrive in the period, thus offering an alternative to the narrative of disenchantment that orients many scholarly accounts. In addition to his research in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, he has also taught creative writing. He recently published a book of poetry, "Painstaker".

Select Articles, Chapters, Reviews, and Other Publications (4)

“Sacheverell’s ‘Exploded’ Obedience: Restoration and Performance in the Early Eighteenth Century.”

Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 42.1

2018

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“Satire, Sincerity, and Swift’s ‘Exploded’ Gospel.”

Christianity and Literature. 67:1: 139-162

2017

“Slavery and Obedience in Restoration and Early 18th-Century Drama.”

Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination. 77–92

Ed. Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach

2013

The Performance of “Pious Fraud”: Reading Passive Obedience in Dryden’s Don Sebastian (1689)

Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700

Jeffrey Galbraith

2012 This essay examines how obedience to authority structures John Dryden’s Don Sebastian, a tragicomedy produced after William of Orange deposed James II in the Revolution of 1688. Because Dryden resigned his position as Poet Laureate after the Revolution rather than swear an oath of allegiance to the new monarch, scholars have interpreted Don Sebastian as the work of a defeated loyalist hoping for the return of the exiled James II. The depiction of obedience in the play, however, goes beyond the question of who should possess the throne to comment more broadly on the agency available to individuals in relations of submission...

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