Dr. Thomas Salem Manganaro

Manganaro specializes in seventeenth-century, eighteenth-century, and Romantic-era literature with particular interests in intellectual history, literature and philosophy, and aesthetic theory. He teaches courses in the history and theory of the novel, Romanticism, literature and the environment, literature and animals, Arab-American literature, and more.

Manganaro’s first book, Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century, was published with the University of Virginia Press in 2022 and was awarded the Walker Cowen Prize for outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. Against Better Judgment focuses on people in literature who freely and knowingly know what they should not do — a condition known as “akrasia” or “weakness of will” in philosophy. It argues that the concept became especially important for eighteenth-century authors, presenting challenges and opportunities to write in ways philosophy could not. Manganaro is currently working on a second book project, provisionally titled Saying and Showing in the Early Novel, which reconsiders the “show don’t tell” dictum through attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose fictions.

He has essays published or forthcoming in various journals including ELH, The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, Studies in Romanticism, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.