David Carroll Simon

David Carroll Simon works in the field of comparative literature, with a focus on the early modern period. In addition to questions of literary form and genre, he is interested in the history of science and philosophy; the history of the passions, including the history of sexuality; feminism, including early modern traditions; and social and economic history.

Simon is the author of Light without Heat: The Observational Mood from Bacon to Milton (Cornell University Press, 2018), which argues for the importance of careless inattention and open-ended receptivity to the literary and philosophical experiments of England's scientific revolution. He is now at work on a study of comedy, gender subordination, sexuality, and attention management.

Recently, Simon has taught courses on Shakespeare, Milton, methods in the discipline of English, the literature and philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science and fiction, ethico-political dimensions of comedy, and recent developments in feminist theory and LGBTQ Studies.