Alex Eric Hernandez

Alex Eric Hernandez is Principal of Victoria College and Associate Professor in the Department of English, where he specializes in 18th-century literature and culture. His scholarship aims at an interdisciplinary approach to the period, balancing an attention to historical detail alongside theoretical frames that privilege reparation, description and anthropological curiosity. 

His first book, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering (Oxford), offers an innovative reading of how 18th-century tragedy developed in relation to the emotions of ordinary people. In it, he argues that a number of innovative tragic works concerned with the misfortunes of the middle class imagined a particularly modern form of suffering across page and stage. New research continues to explore interests in religion, affect, critique and Enlightenment and forms the basis for two current projects. One, tentatively titled, The Fabrics of Religion, concerns the productive ways in which readerly and religious practice are taken up in the materials of the long eighteenth century; another, Empire’s Prayerbook, considers how the Book of Common Prayer imagines a binding metaphysics across contested borders and amorphous spaces. Both projects have been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 

His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Representations, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Modern Philology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022.

A former fellow with the Social Sciences Research Council, the Lewis Walpole Library and the Clark Library, he led an interdisciplinary working group on the theme of Postsecular or Postcritique?: New Approaches to Reading Religion for several years, which began as a working group funded through the Jackman Humanities Institute. 

In 2021, he was awarded the Faculty of Arts & Science Outstanding Teaching Award.

Selected Publications

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering (Oxford 2019)

“In the Church of Saint Jane: Literature, Lived Religion, and the Descriptive Turn,” Modern Language Quarterly (2022) 83.4: 461-80.

“Medea in Petticoats: She-Tragedy and the Domestication of Passion,” in Shadows of Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe’s Age of Reason, ed. Blair Hoxby (Ohio State University Press, 2022)

“Prosaic Suffering: Bourgeois Tragedy and the Aesthetics of the Ordinary,” Representations 138, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 117-40.

“Tragedy and the Economics of Providence in Richardson’s Clarissa”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 599-630.

“Commodity and Religion in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock”, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 569-84.