Daniel Williams

Associate Professor of Literature

Primary Academic Program: Literature

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Africana Studies, Environmental Studies, Victorian Studies

Daniel Williams is the associate professor of literature at Bard College. His research ranges across
nineteenth-century British literature and the histories of science, philosophy, and law, and
extends to climate change, the environmental humanities, and contemporary South and Southern
African literature. Before joining Bard, he was Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His first book, The
Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge, 2024), was
shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) Book Prize in 2025. His
second book project follows weather, climate, and social representation through nineteenth-
century literature, science, and art. He has co-edited special issues of Poetics Today on “Logic
and Literary Form” (2020), with Jeffrey Blevins, and of Literature Compass on “Collecting,
Collections, and Collectors in the Long Nineteenth Century” (2024), with Jacob Risinger, and
since 2020 has co-edited the latter journal’s “Nineteenth-Century Networks” section. His articles
and reviews have appeared in ELH, Novel, Modern Language Notes, Victorian Studies,
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Journal of
Victorian Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Genre, Comparative Literature Studies, Studies
in the Novel, Anglia, Safundi, and Public Books, as well as in edited collections including The
Link Between Animal Abuse and Human Violence (2009), The Oxford Handbook of Law and
Humanities (2019), The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee (2023), and Gerard Manley
Hopkins in Context (2024).

AB, Harvard College; MPhil, University of Cambridge, Magdalene College; PhD, Harvard
University. At Bard since 2019.

Contact:

Phone: 845-758-7193
Website: https://www.danielbenjaminwilliams.com/
Email:
Office: Aspinwall, 306