Samuel Diener

Samuel specialises in Anglophone literature of the early modern period and eighteenth century. He also does comparative work in Spanish and Portuguese. His research uncovers ways people imagined their identity from the early colonial period though Romanticism.

Samuel’s first book project, The Maritime Travel Book and the Collective Imagination, traces how people imagined what it meant to be part of a “we” as they wrote and read colonial-era tales of voyages. His 2025 articles in PMLA and Eighteenth-Century Studies are adapted from this work; a related project appeared in Women Writers in Context in 2019. He is now at work on a new book on personal identity and material culture, building on a 2019 article in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and has written on new materialist scholarship more broadly in Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and in reviews for other journals.

Before coming to Bowdoin, Samuel worked as a lecturer in English at Exeter College, Oxford; a postdoctoral fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge; an adjunct professor of English at Emmanuel College, Boston; and a Preceptor of Expository Writing at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 2022.