David Porter

Languages:  French, German, Spanish, Chinese.

Affiliations: English, Detroit River Story Lab.

Teaching interests: In recent years, I have been teaching a wide variety of courses on early modern literature, literary journalism, literary theory, and public humanities.

Recent courses: 

• Eng 630 - Professional Humanities Careers * TCS 501 - Approaches to Transcultural Studies 
• Eng 244 - Introduction to Literary Journalism 
• Eng 351 - The Modern Self and its Critics 
• Eng 627 - Theory of Metaphor 
• Eng 442 - English Poetry from Shakespeare to Shelley

Research interests: Much of my research has explored approaches to thinking China and Europe together in the early modern period. My first book charted European responses to Chinese cultural achievements in language, religion, the arts, and trade between 1600 and 1800; subsequent work has turned to the assimilation of Chinese aesthetic ideas in Europe and the comparative study of literary and philosophical trends in China and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Closer to home, my focus on transcultural dynamics has also led, in recent years, to a growing interest in the literary, environmental, and sociocultural history of the Great Lakes region, which has led to projects including a campus-wide theme semester on the Great Lakes and an interdisciplinary, grant-funded public engagement project called the Detroit River Story Lab.

Book Publications:

Monographs:

• The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Reprinted in paperback 2014. 
• Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. (Translation rights have been acquired by Jiangsu People’s Publishing House.) 

Edited Collections and Special Issues:

• Early Modern China in a Global Context: Comparative Approaches (invited guest editor, with introduction). Special issue of Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 17.2 (Spring, 2017). 
• Comparative Early Modernities: 1100-1800 (editor, with introduction). New York: Palgrave, 2012. 
• Between Men and Feminism (editor, with introduction). London: Routledge, 1992. Reprinted in paperback 2013.
• Internet Culture (editor, with introduction). New York: Routledge, 1997.

Other publications

Articles:

• “The Detroit River Story Lab: Community Narratives and Ecosystems in Great Lakes Research,” Journal of Great Lakes Research (in production).
• “Rethinking Comparison: The Case of China in Early Modern Cultural Studies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 17.2 (Spring, 2017). 
• “Early Modern,” in Carlos Rojas and Andrea Buchner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 
• “China and the Formation of the Modernist Aesthetic Ideal,” in Anne Witchard, ed., Modernism and Chinoiserie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. 
• “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” Profession 2011. Reprinted in ADFL Bulletin 42.2 (2013).
• “Trans-Eurasian Convergences in Early Modern Women's Writing,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2012). 
• “China and the Invention of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Peter Wagner and Frédéric Ogée, eds., Taste and the Senses in the Eighteenth Century. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011. 
• “Teaching Literature in the U.S.: New Approaches and Controversies,” in Wen-ching Ho, ed., Teaching English Language and Literature: Linking Theory to Practice. Taichung, Taiwan: Feng Chia University, 2011. 
• “What is Universal about Universal Human Rights?” CICS International Connections 3.2 (2011). 
• “Sinicizing Early Modernity: The Imperatives of Historical Cosmopolitanism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43.3 (2010). 
• “Democracy or Bust: Why our Knowledge about What the Chinese Lack is Really No Knowledge at All,” in Kate Merkel-Hess, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, eds., China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. 
• “China is Not a Foreign Country: The Promises and Perils of Cross-Cultural Comparison,” Michigan Quarterly Review 47.2 (2008), 169-181. 
• “Taihu Tatlers: Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade,” in Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, eds., Women and Material Culture: 1660-1830. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 
• “‘Beyond the Bounds of Truth: Cultural Translation and William Chambers’ Chinese Garden,” Mosaic 37.2 (2004): 41-58. 
• “A Wanton Chase in a Foreign Place: Hogarth and the Gendering of Chinese Exoticism,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 33 (2004): 399-414.
• “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002): 395-411. Chinese translation published as 18世纪英国的时尚与中国审美趣味 in 美学与艺术评论 (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Review) 22.1 (2021), 108-22. 
• “China and the Critique of Religious Fanaticism in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Darrin McMahon, ed., The Enlightenment and its Others. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002 
• “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2000): 181-200 
• “’From Chinese to Goth:’ Walpole and the Gothic Repudiation of Chinoiserie,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23 (1999): 46-58 
• “Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 27-54 
• “Rhetorical Phallacies: The Poetics of Misogyny in Jean de Meun's Discourse of Nature,” Mediaevalia 22 (1998), 59-77 
• “Writing China: Legitimacy and Representation 1606-1773.” Comparative Literature Studies 33 (1996), 98-122 
• “His Master's Voice: The Politics of Narragenitive Desire in The Tempest,” Comitatus 24 (1993), 33-44 Translation from the Chinese of speech by Chinese novelist Su Tong, 
• “Where do we encounter reality?” Chinese Literature Today 3:1-2 (2013): 52-4. Translation from the Chinese of speech by Chinese novelist Su Tong, 
• “How is creativity served by revisiting our childhood past?” Chinese Literature Today 3:1-2 (2013): 55-7.