Join the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello for a virtual Fellow's Forum with Stephen Bygrave, Professor of English at the University of Southampton.
Click here to join us on Zoom on Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 4:00 p.m. ET!
The English natural philosopher and theologian Joseph Priestley met Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia in July 1797. Jefferson wrote that Priestley’s theological works provided him with "the basis of my own faith" and in his retirement at Monticello, he returned to those works and resumed correspondence with John Adams, in which the longstanding religious controversies of Britain bulked large in present political controversies in the United States. Priestley was no longer alive in 1813 to see Jefferson enlist him in the cause of enlightened improvement, but they shared a conviction that progress required no recourse to antique models. Stephen Bygrave seeks to examine the rhetoric of the print controversies over such claims in the early decades of the nineteenth century and the religious and political controversies into which the immigrant intellectual was plunged.
About the Speaker
Professor Stephen Bygrave is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Bygrave did a BA in English at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a PhD at St John's College, Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge, Leeds, UEA, King's College London, Dundee, and for the Open University, and for shorter periods at the Universities of Barcelona and Frankfurt. He has held fellowships at The Huntington Library (San Marino, California), the Clark Library (UCLA), from the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust. In 2019, he was the Joseph Peter Spang III Fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut and a Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra. He is the author of books on Coleridge, eighteenth-century education, Kenneth Burke and others.