Teaching Areas:
Technical Writing, Literature and Science, Early Modern Literature, Digital Humanities
Biography:
Jacob Tootalian teaches undergraduate courses in Portland State’s technical writing program. He was previously a visiting faculty member and digital teaching fellow at the University of South Florida. His research interests revolve around literature, rhetoric, and the history of science, with a historical focus on early modern English culture. He is also interested in digital approaches to pedagogy, text analysis, and scholarly editing. He serves as co-director of Digital Cavendish (digicavendish.org), a scholarly collaborative exploring the work of seventeenth-century natural philosopher and poet Margaret Cavendish. His in-progress book project, Mists and Uncertainties: Poetic Figuration and English Scientific Prose, 1640–1671, examines the formal theories and textual practices of natural philosophers, alchemists, physicians, midwives, and other scientific writers at a dynamic moment in intellectual history shaped by both Renaissance humanism’s emphasis on rhetorical knowledge-making and the emerging Enlightenment’s investment in the natural sciences as the foundation for truth.
Publications:
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“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).