Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
Areas of Interest
- 18th Century and Romantic literature and culture
- Enlightenment, religion and secularization
- History of emotion
- Tragedy
Biography
Alex Eric Hernandez is an Associate Professor in the Department of English where he specializes in 18th-century literature and culture and serves as Associate Chair, Director of Undergraduate Studies. His scholarship aims at an interdisciplinary approach to the period, balancing an attention to historical detail alongside theoretical frames that privilege reparation, description and anthropological curiosity.
His first book, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering (Oxford), offers an innovative reading of how 18th-century tragedy developed in relation to the emotions of ordinary people. In it, he argues that a new series of tragedies concerned with the misfortunes of the middle class imagined a particularly modern form of suffering across page and stage. New research continues to explore interests in religion, affect, critique and Enlightenment and looks to the materials through which encounters with the sacred were and are mediated across a long, wide, and deep 18th century. Among these materials: William Cowper’s sofa, a lady’s patchwork screen, Mohawk prayerbooks, and the contemporary Jane Austen devotional. That project, tentatively titled The Fabrics of Religion, has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Representations, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Modern Philology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022.
A former fellow with the Social Sciences Research Council, the Lewis Walpole Library and the Clark Library, for the past several years he has led an interdisciplinary working group on the theme of Postsecular or Postcritique?: New Approaches to Reading Religion which began as a working group funded through the Jackman Humanities Institute.
In 2021, he was awarded the Faculty of Arts & Science Outstanding Teaching Award.
Selected Publications
The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering (Oxford 2019)
“In the Church of Saint Jane: Literature, Lived Religion, and the Descriptive Turn,” Modern Language Quarterly (2022) 83.4: 461-80.
“Medea in Petticoats: She-Tragedy and the Domestication of Passion,” in Shadows of Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe’s Age of Reason, ed. Blair Hoxby (Ohio State University Press, 2022)
“Prosaic Suffering: Bourgeois Tragedy and the Aesthetics of the Ordinary,” Representations 138, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 117-40.
“Tragedy and the Economics of Providence in Richardson’s Clarissa”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 599-630.
“Commodity and Religion in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock”, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 569-84.