Raymond Stephanson studies eighteenth-century literature and culture, with a particular interest in the interdisciplinary aspects of literature and sexuality, science, medicine, and reproductive biology. His current work is a study of the origins of science fiction in the mid-eighteenth century.

He has published essays on Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabethan prose fiction. Recent articles have investigated the conjunction of reproductive biology and 18th-century culture. His book, The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750 (2004), studies the function of reproductive tropes as they were widely used in literary and non-literary representations of male creativity.

An active musician, his interest in the history of reproductive biology has also informed musical projects that render the earliest sounds and rhythms of the species as musical compositions. (See Artistic Works).

In June 2009, I was awarded a Saskatchewan Arts Board grant for a music project entitled "Baby Talk."  Completed in January 2011. "Baby Talk" is an electroacoustic project using data and audio files collected from Doppler ultrasound and post-natal infants to compose and record a series of eight musical pieces with musicians that in different ways capture the aural and rhythmical qualities that emanate from us before we can speak.  The master CD that I produced offers a dramatic instance of how we literally and physically embody sound, rhythm, and the potential for musicality at our earliest phase of development.  The underlying assumption of the project is that the natural sounds emanating from pre- and post-natal humans are in themselves worthy sources of musical treatment.

Upcoming undergraduate courses are posted annually on the Department of English website at http://artsandscience.usask.ca/english/ (click on “Undergraduate Students”). My senior undergraduate courses focus on aspects of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature.

A note about graduate student supervision: I am happy to supervise M.A. and Ph.D. students who wish to pursue literary or cultural studies projects in the following areas: poetry to 1760 (especially Alexander Pope); fiction (especially Behn, Defoe, Haywood, Fielding, or Smollett); topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century satire; Restoration and Eighteenth-Century science fiction; the life and works of Laurence Sterne; the histories of sex, gender, and deviance for the period; the conjunction of literature, science, and medicine; reproductive biology and eighteenth-century culture; Restoration and eighteenth-century topics requiring co-supervision. Prospective students are invited to e-mail me about their interests.

The next grad seminar I will be teaching is English 803.3 Topics in Literary and Cultural History: Literature and Science in the Long Eighteenth Century (January-April 2012, Wednesdays, 1:00 pm). Here’s the blurb: That century-long phenomenon usually called The Scientific Revolution has a huge impact on the literary scene, and the Literary also has significant influence on how the new scientific investigations narrate themselves. This research seminar explores the intersection of the histories of literature and science for the period 1660-1818, with focus on selected topics: the new empiricism and the Royal Society (Thomas Sprat, Jonathan Swift, Philosophical Transactions); the new optics (Robert Hooke, Margaret Cavendish); the new science of mind and body (Thomas Willis, John Locke); science and religion (Joseph Addison, William Cowper); plague and fears of contagion (Daniel Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu); the new cosmology (Sir Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope); reproduction and the new embryology (Aristotle's Master-Piece, Jane Sharp, Laurence Sterne); and the rise of science fiction itself (The Man-Plant, Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein). Using selected readings which group the literary and scientific, we will examine the ways in which the “new” science can be understood in relation to literary history, and how literary developments also shape cultural perceptions of the scientific.

18th-Century Literature and Culture 18th-Century Literature and Reproductive Biology 18th-Century Literature and the History of Science 18th-Century Literature and the History of Sexuality 18th-Century Science Fiction

Most of my research and publications in the past decade have been about the interdisciplinary conjunctions of eighteenth-century reproductive biology and eighteeth-century literature and culture.  A book, articles, graduate student supervision, graduate teaching, curated art exhibitions at the Diefenbaker Center and at the Snelgrove gallery, a President's SSHRC grant, a Saskatchewan Arts Board Grant, and many conference presentations have all been part of my larger research and artistic interest in the ways that reproductive biology and its history have informed culture both in the past and now.

I am curently working on two books. The first is tentatively titled The Man-Plant: Ectogenesis and the Birth of Science Fiction in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. The second is an edited collection of essays on reproduction in the "long" eighteenth century.