Adam Potkay
William R. Kenan Professor of Humanities
College of William & Mary
Jamestown, Virginia

Adam Potkay is William R. Kenan Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he has taught since 1990. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University and at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He holds degrees from Cornell University (B.A., 1982), The Johns Hopkins University (M.A. 1986), and Rutgers University (Ph.D., 1990). Professor Potkay is also an internationally recognized scholar of 18th-century literature and culture. His numerous publications include The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) and The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Cornell University Press, 1994). His most recent work, The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism, won the prestigious Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association for best book in literary criticism and history. He is the co-editor (with Sandra Burr) of a collection of autobiographies and sermons by some of the earliest black writers in English, Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). He has published scholarly articles and more popular essays in a wide variety of journals, from 18th-Century Studies and Studies in Early Modern Philosophy to Philosophy Now and Raritan Quarterly.