Assistant Professor
Office: 441 Clemens
Phone: 716-645-0695
Email: dalff@buffalo.edu
INTERESTS
17th and 18th-century Anglophone writing and performance, infrastructure, public works, projects and projection, parochial and municipal governance
WORKS IN PROGRESS
I am writing a book called The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects and British Culture 1640 – 1780. This monograph analyzes the concept of the “project,” concrete yet incomplete human endeavor, as it evolved across various fields of knowledge and modes of expression in the 1600 and 1700s. My study concentrates on the unrealized ambitions of proposal authors, examining the rhetorical properties and performative undertakings of defunct plans for poor relief, crop plantation, road systems, wetlands reclamation, and new commodities. I argue that expired plans for futures that never happened expose representational devices and persuasive strategies contrived to make imagined improvements appear imminently achievable.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
“Why No One Can Mend the Slough of Despond.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54.3 (Forthcoming Fall 2013)
“Annus Mirabilis in 1688: Repackaging a Year of Wonders.” Restoration: Studies in English Literature 35.2
“Unearthing a ‘Universal Correspondence:’ Defoe’s Roman Roads Project,” in Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe, ed. Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, and Holly Faith Nelson (AMS Press, forthcoming)
“Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today: Baltimore and the Promise of Reform.” Down to the Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, eds. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (Continuum Press, November 2009)
COURSES
ENG455: “Highways, Sewers, Ports: Building Modern Britain 1660 – 1820,” Spring 2013
ENG317: “18th Century Literature: Restoration Drama,” Spring 2013
ENG318: “18th Century Literature: Fiction,” Fall 2012
ENG319a: “18th Century Literature: Poetry,” Fall 2012
