Education

• Ph.D. 2009 The University at Buffalo-SUNY
• M.A. 2006 The University at Buffalo-SUNY
• B.A. 2002 The Australian National University

Teaching Interests

• Eighteenth-Century British Literature
• Literary Theory

Peter DeGabriele specialises in the study of eighteenth century literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on the relation between literary texts and the political philosophy and epistemology of the period. His first book Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political (Bucknell, 2015) examines the role of the novelists and historians of the eighteenth century in developing a vision of political modernity that questions traditional narratives about the rise of liberalism and the decline of sovereign power. His second book is entitled Drone Enlightenment: The Colonial Roots of Modern Warfare (UVA Press, 2023), and it argues that drone warfare has its intellectual, ideological, and practical roots in the way the Enlightenment imagined moral agency, occupation, race, and sovereignty. As a consequence of seeing drone warfare as a creature of the Enlightenment, the book also reevaluates the Enlightenment itself.

Books

• Drone Enlightenment: The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare. The University of Virginia Press, 2023.
• Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political. ISBN 978-1-61148-696-4. Bucknell University Press, 2015.

Articles and Reviews

• "The Foot and the Spear: Enlightenment Natural Law, Translation, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Australia" Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 36, no. 4, 2024 
• “Parroting Solitude: The Alienated Voice in Julío Cortázar’s ‘Adios Robinson’” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries. 14.1 (2022).
• "Colonel Jack's Pocket: Subjectivity, Money, and Materiality in Daniel Defoe" The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 61.2 (2020), 245-261.
• Review Essay: "David Simpson's States of Terror, Martha McGill's Ghosts in Englightenment Scotland, and The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion" Eighteen-Century Fiction, 35.1, 2023, 143-149.
• "Resistance, Immunity, and Polite Silence: The Legacy of 1688 in David Hume’s Political Thought," Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700. 39:1-2 (2015).
• "Clothes Make the Ape: The Satirical Animal in Rochester's Poetry," Early Modern Literary Studies. 18:1-2 (2015).
• "Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650-1750 by Christopher F. Loar" (review), Studies in the Novel, 47.1 (2015).
• "The Legal Fiction and Epistolary Form: Frances Burney’s Evelina," Early Modern Cultural Studies, 14.2 (2014).
• "Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England by Wolfram Schmidgen" (review), Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 14.1 (2014).
• "Sympathy for the Sovereign: Sovereignty, Sympathy, and the Colonial Relation in Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Project Muse, 51.1 (2012).
• "Intimacy, Survival, and Resistance: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year," ELH, 77.1, 2010.
• Editor (With Sol Pelaez and Shane Herron) of "Semblance," a special issue of Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, 2007.

Review: Drone Enlightenment: The Colonial Roots of Modern Warfare by Peter DeGabriele (review) by Kevin MacDonnell 

Review: Drone Enlightenment: The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare by P. DeGabriele by Zainab Abdali

Review: Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Problem of the Political by Peter DeGabriele (review) by Tony C. Brown 

Review: Risky Intimacy and the Survival of the Political by Annika Mann