This is a professional site for Nick Valvo. Thanks for stopping by. 👋🏼

Nick is a scholar and teacher of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. You can use this site to get in touch, find out about his scholarship, and check out his CV.

By supplying the correct punctuation, you can reach Nick by his personal email at nvalvo gmail com or his professional email at nvalvo ccc edu; he’s also easy to reach on twitter at @nvalvo.

In his scholarship, Nick examines the history of the boundaries between and among literature, economics and religion — boundaries that were, in early modernity, in the process of being born. In his first book project, The Parish of Parnassus, under contract with UVAP, he uses the contentious cultural politics arising from the Anglican parish, a mode of social life in which spiritual, affective and economic modes of social life were interlaced to the point of unity, as a window into this process of social reorganization. This is an important story for understanding what liberalism is and how it developed, as well as for seeing the participation of disinterested literary aesthetics in that story.

Another book project (working title: Jubilee) will connect these findings to the history of racial imaginaries, using early modern reception of Old Testament scripture to argue that Anglo-Protestant understandings of economic autonomy were central to their development in the Atlantic world.