Aaron Hanlon

Education

D.Phil., Oxford
M.Phil., Cambridge
M.A., Dartmouth
B.A., M.A., Bucknell

Areas of Expertise

• DH / computational study of literature
• British literature c. 1600-1815
• history and philosophy of science in Britain, c. 1600-1815
• philosophy of fiction

My research and teaching mainly concern what Lorraine Daston and Mary Poovey call “historical epistemology,” which Ian Hacking neatly describes in The Emergence of Probability as understanding “the forgotten formation and evolution of core ideas that run through our notions of knowledge and argument: truth, objectivity, evidence, information, probability, proof, experience, experiment, wonder, curiosity, ignorance, classification.” I consider myself anti-disciplinary (as opposed to interdisciplinary), as I believe academic disciplines as practiced are fundamentally bad for the advancement of knowledge.

I’ve also started building a research program in the computational and quantitative study of literature, having recently completed an MPhil in Digital Humanities, with a focus on computational analysis, NLP, and LLM applications, working with Dr. Ryan Heuser. I’m currently preparing for publication my master’s dissertation, “What Was Nonfiction before ‘Nonfiction’? A Computational Answer to a Genre Collapse Problem,” which offers an empirical definition of nonfiction before it became a master-genre in the nineteenth century.

I’m especially interested in examining issues of methodology, epistemology, and the organization of knowledge through the study of fiction (where “fiction” is sometimes an eighteenth-century novel and sometimes a scientific model). Accordingly, my most recent work has been in the area of philosophy of fiction, focused on how to formalize the line of demarcation between fiction and nonfiction, both philosophically and empirically, using computational and quantitative methods.

Publications (peer-reviewed) 

Books

1. A World Of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2019)
2. Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
3. British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 (with Kristin Girten) (Bucknell University Press, 2023)

Journal Articles

1. Quixotic Influence and the Underhill Legacy in The Algerian Captive Comparative American Studies 9.2 (2011): 119-30
2. Re-Reading Gulliver as Quixote: Toward a Theory of Quixotic Exceptionalism Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 21.2-3 (2012): 278-303
3. Gender-Class Kyriarchy in The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.1 (2014): 77-96
4. Toward a Counter-Poetics of Quixotism Studies in the Novel 46.2 (2014): 141-58
5. Margaret Cavendish’s Anthropocene Worlds New Literary History 47.1 (2016): 49-66
6. Quixotism as Global Heuristic: Atlantic and Pacific Diasporas Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 46 (2017): 49-62
7. Perlocutionary Verse in Augustan England Modern Philology 114.3 (2017): 657-79
8. Fanny Hill and the Legibility of Consent English Literary History 86.4 (2019): 941-66
9. Information and Credibility in A Journal of the Plague Year Digital Defoe: Studies of Defoe and His Contemporaries 14.1 (2022)
10. Sense and Sensibility as Social-Epistemic System Studies in the Novel 55.2 (2023): 131-47
11. From Writing Lives to Scaling Lives in Joseph Priestley’s Chart of Biography The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 62.3-4 (2023): 279-93
12. Abraham Cowley Against Bacon’s ‘Idols of the Mind’ Configurations 32.1 (2024): 51-70
13. Explanation Beyond Interpretation Philosophy and Literature 48.1 (2024): 165-84
14. LLM Outputs Are Fictions Critical AI 2.1 (2024)
15. LLM Outputs as Stochascript (with Hannah H. Kim) Modern Fiction Studies [forthcoming 2027; preprint]

Book Chapters

1. Teaching Literature in the Age of Trump in Trumping Ethical Norms, eds. L. Sandy Maisel and Hannah Dineen (Routledge, 2018)
2. Disambiguating “Critical Theory” in Liberalism and Socialism: Enemies or Kin?, ed. Matthew McManus (Palgrave, 2021)
3. Smollett’s Ramblers and the Law of the Land in A Clubbable Man, ed. Anthony Lee (Bucknell University Press, 2022)
4. Comedy versus Satire in Eighteenth-Century Contexts in Teaching Comic Texts, ed. Beverly Hogue (MLA Options for Teaching, 2023)
5. Defoe and Censorship in Daniel Defoe in Context, eds. George Justice and Albert Rivero (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
6. The Ends of Literary Studies in The Ends of Knowledge, eds. Rachael Scarborough King and Seth Rudy (Bloomsbury, 2023) 
7. Literary Technologies of the Sextant in Eighteenth-Century Britain in Histories of Science, eds. David Alff and Danielle Spratt (University of Virginia Press, 2025) 
8. The Success that Was the Humanities in The Humanities Division, eds. Sid Dobrin and Jason Crider (Parlor Press), forthcoming