Professor Daniel O’Quinn
Daniel O’Quinn is a Professor in the School of Theatre, English, and Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. His program of research follows two distinct yet intertwined threads: the study of performance cultures in the long eighteenth-century and the vicissitudes of empire in a wide array of locales. Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics and the Re-Alignment of the Repertoire 1780-1800, the third installment in a series of monographs on the imbrication of performance and imperial policy in the late eighteenth century, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. He is also recently the author of Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations 1690-1815 (Penn, 2018), and co-author with Jennifer Schacker of The Routledge Pantomime Reader 1800-1900 (2021). He is currently working on a project called Topical Mediations: The Timescapes of Quebec in London, 1759-90.
Select publications
Monographs:
- Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics and the Re-Alignment of the Repertoire. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
- Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690-1815 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Short-listed for the Kenshur Prize. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture ran a cluster of essays on the book in 2022.
- Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Runner-up for the Bernard Hewitt Award.
- Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Runner-up for the Bernard Hewitt Award.
Recent essays:
- “Equiano’s Ice, Akomfrah’s Sea,” Word & Image 41.1 (2025): 55-88.
- “Charlotte Smith’s Littoral Zones: Worldmaking in the Elegiac Sonnets and Beyond.” 1650 – 1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (June 2022): 70-87.
- “Sir Joshua Reynolds, Decolonization, and the Pictorial Dialectics of Crisis,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 58.3 (Summer 2018)
- “Half-History, or The function of Cato at the Present Time,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.3-4 (Summer 2015): 479-508.
Select awards
- 2019 – Kenshur Prize, Short-listed for Engaging the Ottoman Empire
- 2010-11 – Joe A. Callaway Prize for best book in Drama and Theatre, Honourable Mention, Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium)
- 2006 – Bernard Hewitt Award for Excellence in Theatre History, Honorable Mention, American Society for Theatre Research (for Staging Governance)
Further links
University of Guelph Faculty Profile:
https://www.uoguelph.ca/profile/daniel-oquinn
