Tom Clayton

Tom Clayton is a scholar of the literature and culture of early modernity. His current research project focuses on post-Reformation literature and political philosophy in England and the transatlantic world. A book manuscript titled The Reformation of Indifference shows how the liberal theory and practice of toleration emerged from critical and imaginative engagements with a Protestant concept of indifference. A second project in development is a study of letters, literary labor, and the delivery of the mail in England, set against the drive to formalize a national postal service in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Representations, the Journal of Early Modern Studies, and elsewhere. At Colgate, he teaches literature from classical antiquity to the present, offering courses on John Milton, the Restoration and eighteenth century, race and empire, poetry and poetics, and the longer histories of English literature and culture.