Daniel Ritchie

Job Title

• Professor of English
  English and Journalism, College of Arts and Sciences

Highlight

Ritchie has won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support Bethel's Humanities Program (2007) and a new course entitled "What Good is Leisure?" (2013). He's led seven study-abroad courses, including five of Bethel's "England Term" semesters. In 2018, he published articles in "Christianity and Literature" (on Milton's "Paradise Lost") and "National Affairs" (on conflicting visions of how to fashion a free people). He won Bethel's Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching in 2006.

Started at Bethel

1985

Education

• Amherst College - B.A. Cum laude in Greek, 1978
• Rutgers University - M.A. in English, 1980
• Rutgers University - Ph.D. in English, 1985

Publications

"Fashioning a Free People." National Affairs. No. 34. Winter 2018. 161-76.

"Choosing Rest in Paradise Lost." co-written with Jared Hedges, '15. Christianity and Literature. 67.2 (2018): 271-93.

"Anthony Trollope and the 'Trouthe' about Manhood." Law and Liberty. 31 August 2018.

"The Fault Lies in Ourselves: Coriolanus at the Royal Shakespeare Company." Public Discourse. 12 November 2017.

"Is the Party Over?" National Affairs. No. 31, Spring 2017. 101.114.

"Powerful Sympathies Powerfully Restrained." review essay of The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke by David Bromwich, vol. 1 (Harvard UP, 2014). Law and Liberty. 23 January 2017. 

Presentations

Conference Director, "American Political Parties and Ordered Liberty." Liberty Fund Colloquium. April 4-7, 2019, Indianapolis, IN

Conference Presentation, with Kelsey Widman, '16. "The Problem of Naming God in Walker Percy's Novels." Conference on Christianity and Literature, "The Problem With God." March 29-30, 2019. Harvard Divinity School.

Conference Director, "Liberty and the Sabbath," Liberty Fund Colloquium. July 16-19, 2017, Santa Fe, NM

Chair, "Fashioning a Free People." Panel SS126. American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies annual Meeting (Minneapolis 2017).

Conference Director. "Educating the Free Citizen in the Modern World." Liberty Fund Colloquium. April 2016, Chicago, IL.

Areas of expertise

Ritchie teaches courses in British literature and specializes in the 18th century. In 2002, he guided Bethel’s efforts to begin a Humanities Program, a team-taught, 4-course introduction to the Western tradition. In 2006, he won Bethel’s Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching. He has edited 2 books on Edmund Burke and has written 2 books of literary criticism, Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age and The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer.

Quote

"Art is man's nature." Edmund Burke, "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" (1791)