Stanford Humanities Center
Ali Madani is a literary and cultural historian of early modern England. He received his MA from the University of Pennsylvania and PhD from Brown University, where he was a founding board member of the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World. His research and teaching examine Shakespeare and Renaissance poetics, premodern race, and histories of criticism and modern discipline formation.
SHC Project
Categorical Fictions: Literary History, Colonialism, and the Forms of Early Modern English
Categorical Fictions tracks the aesthetic and political consequences of standardizing history writing during the period of early modern colonial expansion. By conceiving of historiography in its aesthetic, disciplinary, and methodological registers, this project reads England’s nascent scientism as the foundation for a set of negotiations concerning the proper contents of literary and historical forms. Categorical Fictions overlays historiographical uncertainty onto the early modern genre system to evince the challenges of writing in an era newly constrained by demands for material evidence, eye-witness testimony, and hard fact. Foregrounding the flexibility of early modern narrative credibility, this project argues for the indebtedness of concepts of fiction and literature to colonialist historiographical procedures.
