Denise Gigante in England

Denise Gigante is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University and has been a professor in the department of English since 2000. She received her BA from Yale and her PhD from Princeton, both universities that fostered a deep love of literature that has been brewing for nearly six decades. She teaches British Romantic literature, and poetry over a longer tradition. Her interests include poetic form and aesthetics, bibliomania and literary antiquarianism, gastronomy, the history and form of the essay, material print culture, and the mixed-media work of William Blake.

Her books include Taste: A Literary History (2005), Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (2009), The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (2011), and Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America (2022). Her study of William Blake, The Mental Traveller: A Blakean Pilgrimage through Medieval and Renaissance Iconography, is the result of her Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University in 2020 and is due to be published with hundreds of color illustrations by Oxford University Press. Her edited volume, The Cambridge History of the British Essay (2024) follows upon her edited anthologies in the essay genre: The Great Age of the English Essay (2008) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy. She is also the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

• B.A., Yale University, 1987

• M.A., Princeton University, 1997

• Ph.D., Princeton University, 2000