Mark D. Koch
Appointments
Lecturer
Area of Expertise
Composition pedagogy, multimodal writing, and first-year college writing,
Almsgiving, beggary, and charity in British literature from 1600 to 1800,
Sympathy, sentimentalism, and charity sermons in the eighteenth-century ,
Cartography and eighteenth-century British literature,
Literature of paranoia and conspiracy; Shakespeare; the rise of the novel; love, marriage, and contract in the eighteenth-century
Biography
While I have recently retired from full-time teaching, I remain committed to the project of first-year writing as essential training for complex academic thinking. In addition to teaching many, many composition and literature courses, I have also served as an administrator for writing programs, including as the associate director of the first-year writing program at the University of Michigan where I worked with PhD students to develop their teaching as they taught their first writing classes. While at Dartmouth I continued in a similar capacity, as assistant director of the Writing Program and as director of Writing 2-3. My research interests and publications were largely in British literature of the early modern and eighteenth-century periods, with a particular interest in cartography and its relation to literature, as well as on beggary, almsgiving, and gift-exchange economics. My last published article considered the rhetoric of British charity sermons in the 18th century.
Education
B.A. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
M.A. State University of New York at Buffalo
Ph.D. State University of New York at Buffalo
Publications
"'A Spectacle Pleasing to God and Man': Sympathy and the Show of Charity in the Restoration Spittle Sermons," Eighteenth-Century Studies 46: 4 (Summer 2013).
"Ruling the World: The Cartographic Gaze in English Accounts of the New World." Literature and Geography. Ed. Richard Helgerson and Joanne Woolway. Special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature. October 1998.
"The Desanctification of the Beggar in Rogue Pamphlets of the English Renaissance." The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Edited by David G. Allen and Robert A. White. Newark: University of Delaware UP, 1992. 91-104.
"Utilitarian and Reactionary Arguments for Almsgiving in Wordsworth's 'The Old Cumberland Beggar'." Eighteenth-Century Life 13: 3 (November 1989): 18-33.
"The Shaking of the Superflux: King Lear, Charity, and the Tyranny of Equivalence." The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 10 (1990): 86-100.
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