Teaching Areas: Technical Writing, Science Writing, Literature and Science, Science Fiction, Early Modern Literature, Digital Humanities
Biography:
Jacob Tootalian’s teaching and research interests revolve around rhetoric, literature, and the history of science. His scholarship has a historical focus on early modern English intellectual culture. He is also interested in digital approaches to pedagogy, text analysis, and critical editing. He serves as co-director of Digital Cavendish and is one of the general editors (with Liza Blake and Shawn Moore) of The Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish, a twenty-volume collection under contract with Punctum Books and funded by a Canadian SSHRC grant. His in-progress book project, Mists and Uncertainties: English Science Writing and the Figurative Imagination in the Seventeenth Century, examines the formal theories and textual practices of natural philosophers, alchemists, midwives, physicians, and other scientific writers at a transitional moment in intellectual history, exploring the role that rhetorical artistry and poetic possibility play in the making of knowledge about the natural world.
Publications:
- “Cavendish Studies and the Digital Turn.” With Shawn Moore. Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Eds. Lisa Walters and Brandie Siegfried (Cambridge UP, 2022). 261–273.
- “Leviathan and the Bagpipe: Hobbes and the Poetics of Figuration in the English Revolution.” The Seventeenth Century 33.1 (2017): 63–85.
- “‘That Giant Monster Call’d a Multitude’: A Precursor to Leviathan’s Figurative Invocation.” Hobbes Studies 30.2 (2017): 223–235.
- “‘[T]o corrupt a man in the midst of a verse’: Ben Jonson and the Prose of the World.” The Ben Jonson Journal 24.1 (2017): 46–72.
- “Without Measure: The Language of Shakespeare’s Prose.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.4 (2013): 47–60.
- “‘Let others sing of knights and paladins’: Teaching The Faerie Queene and the Sonnet with Samuel Daniel’s Delia 46.” This Rough Magic 4.2 (2013).