Andrew Stott

Assistant Professor
Department of English
435 Clemens Hall
716-645-2575 ext. 1041
Email: amstott@buffalo.edu

I was born and brought up in the south east of England, arriving in Buffalo in 2002. I took my PhD at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, under the supervision of Professor Catherine Belsey. My dissertation, completed in 1994, dealt with the concept of vision and the fate of visual tropes in the English art and literature of the post-reformation decades. It were probably best to describe me as an early-modernist with a strong interest in theory rather than the other way around.

Since college, I have held lecturing positions at the universities of Leeds, Hertfordshire and Westminster in central London. I also spent four years as a stand-up comic and a short while studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York City.

I pursue neither of these peculiar avenues any longer, although my research interests retain the influence of them. I continue to write on early-modern visual culture and the tropes of vision in language, most recently for the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in New Orleans, 2004. The principal focus of my research, though, is the history, theory and philosophy of comedy, particularly the investigation of comic modes as a means of interrogating normative concepts. I am especially interested in issues of identity, travesty and transformation in comic narrative, the use of comedy as an expression of conservative consensus or type of critical practice that manufactures incongruity, and the status of laughter as 'a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation' (Bergson). While I am interested in all kinds of comedy from Aristotle to the present day and across all media, I remain always an early-modernist, currently writing on the ethics of laughter and deformity in sixteenth-century medical manuals and in literary debates.

I also organize UB's Early-Modern Reading Group, a vibrant inter-disciplinary collection of faculty and graduate students who share research interests in sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-century studies. The EMRG invites two speakers per semester and has hosted guests as accomplished and diverse as Richard Kagan (Johns Hopkins), Valerie Traub (Michigan), Marcus Rediker (Pittsburgh), Karen Kupperman (NYU) Elizabeth Harvey (Toronto), Crystal Bartolovich (Syracuse), and Heather Dubrow (Wisconsin-Madison).

I have published articles in journals including Textual Practice, Criticism, Cahiers Elisabethains and Word & Image. A collection of theoretical essays, co-edited with Peter Buse, entitled Ghosts: Deconstruction Psychoanalysis History (Macmillan), was chosen by the Times Literary Supplement as one of its books of the year in 1999. My book Comedy was published by Routledge in 2004.

My recent graduate course offerings include 'An Eternal Blot: English Renaissance Visual Culture', 'Literary and Critical Theory in Renaissance Studies', and 'Comic Aesthetics'.