Paul Grimstad is Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Humanities program. He writes regularly for The Believer, Bookforum, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, n+1, The Paris Review, Music and Literature, The New Republic, Times Literary Supplement and other journals and magazines. His “Miles the Mercurial” was a notable selection for Best American Essays of 2021 (ed. Kathryn Schulz). His next book Interested in Everything and Nothing Else: On the Polymath is under advance contract with Princeton University Press.
He is the author of Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (Oxford, 2013) which was recently the focus of a symposium in the journal Nonsite, and has contributed chapters to the Oxford Handbook to Edgar Allan Poe, Melville’s Philosophies, Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies, the Oxford History of the Novel, and to forthcoming volumes The Jamesian Mind and The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. While an assistant professor of English at Yale he received the Sarai Ribicoff ’79 teaching prize for “instruction and character that reflect the qualities of independence, innovation, and originality.” He has taught literature and philosophy at NYU, Columbia and Yale.
Some Recent Writing
On Iris Murdoch and Linguistic Philosophy
On Lewis Carroll and the Number 42
Courses
Directed Studies: Philosophy
The Detective Story: Solving Mysteries from Oedipus to Sherlock
Thought Experiments: Connecting Literature, Philosophy and the Natural Sciences