Claude Willan

Claude Willan serves as Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, specializing in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century literary cultures through interdisciplinary methodologies including book history, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and critical theory.

His research investigates how literary authority was constructed following the 1688 Revolution, with particular focus on Alexander Pope's appropriation of rhetorical frameworks and Samuel Johnson's subsequent engagement with Pope as a literary exemplum. This work culminated in his monograph "Literary Authority: an Eighteenth-Century Genealogy" (Stanford University Press, 2023), which demonstrates how opposing reactions to the Glorious Revolution shaped eighteenth-century literary discourse.