Robert DeMaria Jr.

Robert DeMaria Jr. is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English Literature at Vassar College. He specializes in 18th-century literature, with a focus on Samuel Johnson and textual scholarship. His recent work includes co-editing The Complete Poems of Samuel Johnson (2024), a landmark 1,000-page volume published by Routledge for the Longman Annotated English Poets series. This edition provides extensive commentary on Johnson’s poetry, spanning his career from early works in Lichfield to his London years.

DeMaria’s research integrates biblical, classical, and modern literary contexts, with particular attention to Johnson’s engagement with Latin and Greek verse. The project was supported by Vassar College through the MacCracken and Turner Funds, marking a milestone as the first volume in the series co-edited by an American scholar.

His broader scholarly contributions include monographs such as Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Oxford, 1986) and Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Johns Hopkins, 1997). He serves as General Editor of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson and Editor of the Johnsonian News Letter.