Associate Professor of English
Interim Director of the Brady Scholars Program
Vivasvan Soni (Ph.D. Duke University, 2000) studies and teaches eighteenth-century British literature, as well as critical and literary theory. His book, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity, was published by Cornell University Press in 2010 and was the recipient of the Modern Language Association's eighteenth annual Prize for a First Book. In it, he traces the narrative transformations in the eighteenth-century which produce a modern conception of happiness, arguing that these transformations result in the erasure of happiness as a guiding idea in politics. He discovers in classical ideas of happiness, particularly Solon's proverb "Call no man happy until he is dead," the outlines of a concept of happiness that might sustain a utopian politics. In their citation for Soni's book, the MLA prize committee noted that "Mourning Happiness powerfully transcends the usual field limitations of academic scholarship, making a compelling case for how an ancient Greek construal of happiness could reawaken the radical force of that denuded concept in our own present.… This provocative study affirms the importance of narrative form to one of our most upheld and yet least examined ideals.”
Soni's areas of interest include the rise of the novel, moral and political theory, narratology, theories of tragedy, utopian writing and theories of modernity. He is currently at work on two new projects. The first diagnoses a "crisis of judgment" in the eighteenth-century whose legacy is still with us. Read in this context, the novels of Fielding and Austen offer an exemplary pedagogy of judgment. Soni has edited a special issue of the journal ECTI (51.3) on The Crisis of Judgment. His second new project, tentatively titled, The Utopian Imagination: Fiction and the Possibilities of Action, will examine the fate of utopian writing and thinking in modernity.
Faculty Fellow
rowan.mellor@northwestern.edu
Rowan Mellor completed his PhD at University College London in 2021. From 2021-2023, he was a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Rowan’s main research interests are in ethics and political philosophy. His current project focuses on the idea of joint obligation. Specifically, he thinks that it can be true that we jointly ought to do something, even if each of us ought not to do our part.
Faculty Fellow
southgate@northwestern.edu
Libby Southgate works (mostly) in ethics. She is particularly interested in the phenomenon of intractable moral disagreement, both as a datum to be explained in metaethics and as a challenge to be negotiated in applied ethics. She also does work in philosophy of education, particularly on issues in inclusive pedagogy. Libby is currently finishing up a PhD in Philosophy at Cornell University. She is from Scotland and before Cornell, she earned an M.Sc. and an undergraduate M.A.(Hons) in philosophy from the University of Glasgow.
