Srinivas Aravamudan, Principal Investigator

I suspect that am not alone in my selfish tendency to see the work of the scholars I admire in relationship to the essential terms that define my own specialty. Thinking about exceptional careers that have been prematurely curtailed reminds me poignantly that theater is the art of what can be done thrillingly in a relatively short time. Even setting aside the rigors of Shakespeare’s “two hours’ traffic” as the normal limit of a play’s running time, Molière’s company lasted but eleven years, Fielding’s not even that. But they got a lot done in their time, and so did Srinivas Aravamudan in his thrilling career. For him the work of a lifetime includes a prodigious number of wide-ranging publications, a cadre of inspired mentees, and a set of infrastructural improvements to the intellectual life of Duke University, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and “the humanities writ large.” That phrase quotes the words that he chose as the name of Duke’s ambitious program in undergraduate education, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He initiated “The Humanities Writ Large” and served as its Principal Investigator, or “PI.” Although the humanities borrow the term from grant writing in the sciences, “Principal Investigator” well describes his role in “The Humanities Writ Large” as well as other roles. As Professor of English, Literature, and Romance Studies, Dean of Humanities and Director of the Franklin Institute for the Humanities at Duke, and President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, he created many opportunities for scholars working in all the periods, genres, and methodologies of the humanities disciplines, enlarging their scope to include previously neglected regions, languages, and literatures. But also to the lasting benefit of scholarship in our field, in his own research he investigated principally the long eighteenth century, which he rendered three-dimensional by demonstrating that it was also wide and deep.

Appositely, Srinivas’s ASECS Presidential Address for 2016 took up the visionary philosophy of history enunciated by Giambattista Vico (1688–1744). His lecture, read beautifully in his absence by Felicity Nussbaum, was titled “From Enlightenment to the Anthropocene: Vico Behind or Ahead of his Time?” It parsed the terms of Vico’s archeology of the dimly bounded “Ages” of deep time as set forth in La scienza nuova (The New Science, 1725). Speaking from an eighteenth-century worldview that was both wide and deep, Vico divided history into three “Ages”: of Gods, of Heroes, and of Men. These epochs progressed more cyclically than linearly according to a “poetic chronology” of “universal history.”¹ Srinivas reactivated Vico’s terms to help us understand the gravity of our present age in the framework of world-historical periodization, punctuated as it is at intervals by geo-historical fatality, such as the Great Earthquake that wrecked Lisbon in 1755. For Vico, the academic rhetorician, each historical Age had its own dominant explanatory linguistic trope: for the Age of Gods, it was metaphor; for the Age of Heroes, metonymy; for the Age of Men, irony. Vician irony still characterizes the present Age, the one we increasingly agree that we have created for ourselves (hence “Anthropocene”), spiking it with a heavy dose of paradox as the bitter trope of the catastrophic post-human. In sum, the paradox is that this prolific Age of Men threatens to eliminate human beings as we know them from the face of the earth along with most other vertebrates and other species that didn’t get a vote.

Vico was appropriate as the touchstone for the valedictory moment of the Presidential Address for more optimistic reasons as well. That is so because the forward-looking project of understanding and explaining the eighteenth century in the context of world history, while also expanding the franchise of the people who study it by increasing the diversity of voting members, is the overarching aim of Srinivas Aravamudan’s scholarship. There isn’t space here to do justice to his long list of important works, but I want to reflect briefly on a few of my favorite moments from three of them. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency...