Daniel Ritchie

Job Title

Highlight

During his 37 years at Bethel, Daniel Ritchie taught English literature and (in 2002) guided Bethel's efforts to begin a multi-course Humanities Program. During his career, he won grants from the the Newberry Library (2017) and from the National Endowment for the Humanities Program (2007 and 2013) to support the Humanities Program and an interdisciplinary course on leisure. He led seven study-abroad courses, including five of Bethel's "England Term" semesters. In 2001, He won Bethel's Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching in 2006.

Started at Bethel

1985

Education

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

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

Daniel Ritchie specializes in 18th century literature and has a broad interest in the relation of faith and literature. He has edited two books on Edmund Burke and has written two books of literary criticism, "Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age" (Eerdmans 1996) and "The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer" (Baylor 2010).

Quote

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