David Quint

Sterling Professor of English and of Comparative Literature 

David Quint, B.A. Ph.D. Yale University, faculty member at Yale since 1991 after a decade and a half at Princeton: You are a renowned scholar of classical and Renaissance literature, who has published extensively on English and European literature of the 16th and 17th centuries as well as on literary theory and criticism. ​​​

When people talk about humanist scholars who are “learned,” they describe you. You have a working knowledge of six languages, and your research interests range from poetry to the novel, essay, drama, and occasionally even film. You are a gifted translator and are well known for the depth of your scholarship, your innovative interpretations of literary texts, and your elegant prose style. 

You have not hesitated to turn your attention to major works, publishing monographs on Montaigne’s Essays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Cervantes’s Don Quijote, and Virgil’s Aeneid, all of which have been fresh and illuminating. You consistently ask the big-picture humanistic questions, such as “How can literary form and the internal history of genres be related to historical change and evolving social formations?” 

Your first book Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton was called by Christopher Ivic “a major contribution to the study of epic, impressive in scope, rich in commentary and notes, and theoretical sophistication, offering new and exciting possibilities to students and scholars of the epic.” Your Milton book was the winner of the 2015 James Holly Hanford Award from The Milton Society of America, was designated as one of Choice’s outstanding academic titles for 2014, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Christian Gauss Award by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Alessandro Barchiesi writes of your latest, Virgil’s Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid that it is “one of the best books on Virgil” - that is saying something when the subject matter is a classical poet born in 70 BCE and studied from the 1st century onward. In 2018, in Mantua, Italy, the birthplace of Virgil, you were awarded the triennial International Virgil Prize. From the start to the end of your career, critics have offered such homage. 

A Yalie through and through, from your undergraduate through graduate days, you were a student of both Tom Greene and Bart Giamatti. You belong in their line, and you carry on their work and their tradition, with Greene’s erudition and Giamatti’s passion. Your own students, both undergraduate and graduate, have often been among Yale’s most scholarly, knowledgeable, and accomplished, and they have appreciated you for your ​​wisdom, mentorship, and care. In addition to your scholarship, you have given back to your elders, your field, and your university by chairing the Comparative Literature department and providing vigorous leadership to assure its strength. 

Yale has many great scholars. But there are some for whom, it seems, libraries rise and universities exist. You are one of those. You are well ​traveled​ beyond Yale, but much also have you traveled here, in the realms of gold.