Education

Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2009

Academic Summary

Dr. Darryl P. Domingo joined the Department of English at the University of Memphis in 2011, after having earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His research interests are wide-ranging, but his primary area of expertise is in the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain. Taking seriously the formal and thematic intersections between text and context, his research analyzes the ways in which cultural phenomena represent, and are represented by, the devices of literary works. Dr. Domingo's first book, The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2016; paperback reissue in 2018), examined eighteenth-century conceptions of amusement—including the so-called “Reigning Diversions of the Town”—and their implication in the period’s attitudes towards language, rhetoric, and wit. His current book project, an edited collection of essays on Press Advertising and Periodical Journalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, explores how the commercial advertisements that usually subsidized eighteenth-century newspapers and journals complement, contradict, or otherwise complicate the content for which periodicals are better known: leader essays, reportage, occasional poetry, serialized fiction, reviews, epistolary correspondence, “freshest Advices Foreign and Domestic.”

Dr. Domingo’s research has appeared in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Life, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and The Review of English Studies as well as in books published by Cambridge University Press, M.L.A., and Oxford University Press. He has held numerous awards and fellowships, including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship, a visiting fellowship at the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at U.C.L.A., the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship for research in residence at the Newberry Library, Chicago, and a Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities Freeburg Fellowship at the University of Memphis. He enjoys reading the classifieds in his own collection of eighteenth-century newspapers and journals.

Select Publications

Books

• The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016; paperback reissue, 2018). 
• Press Advertising and Periodical Journalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Darryl P. Domingo (manuscript solicited and in progress).

Articles and Book Chapters

• “‘A Continued Succession and Circle of Varieties’: Literature, Leisure, London,” The Cambridge History of the Literature of London, Volume II: 1660-1914, eds. Nicholas Daly and Thomas Keymer (in progress; contracted to Cambridge University Press).
• “Popular Entertainment,” Frances Burney in Context, eds. Albert Rivero and George Justice (in progress; contracted to Cambridge University Press).
• “‘Perpetually Well-Deceived’: McLuhan’s Age of Advertising and the Eighteenth-Century English Press,” forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Life 50.2 (2026).
• “Fielding and / on Journalism: ‘The Good of the Public,’” The Oxford Handbook of Henry Fielding, eds. Thomas Keymer and Henry Power (forthcoming; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026).
• “Periodicals, News, and Journalism,” Daniel Defoe in Context, eds. Albert Rivero and George Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 78-88.
• “The Satiric Page,” Options for Teaching Modern British and American Satire, eds. Evan Davis and Nicholas D. Nace (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2019), 89-99.
• “The Character of a People: Sports and Pastimes in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Review Essay, Eighteenth-Century Life 42.3 (2018): 81-88.
• "Theatre and Drama," Samuel Richardson in Context, eds. Peter Sabor and Betty Schellenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 205-12.
• "Richardson's Unfamiliar Quotations: Clarissa and Early Eighteenth-Century Comedy," The Review of English Studies 66.277 (2015): 936-53.
• "'Well Observed by the Poet': Elias Brand and Richardson's British Ancients," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24.4 (2012): 597-622.
• "Unbending the Mind: or, Commercialized Leisure and the Rhetoric of Eighteenth-Century Diversion," Eighteenth-Century Studies 45.2 (2012): 207-36.
• "William Oldys," Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 356: Eighteenth-Century British Literary Scholars and Critics, ed. Frans De Bruyn (Detroit: Gale, 2010), 222-38.
• "'The Natural Propensity of Imitation': or, Pantomimic Poetics and the Rhetoric of Augustan Wit," Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.2 (2009): 51-95.
• "Scriblerus Takes a London Walk: or, The Pedantic Perambulations of Gay's Trivia," University of Toronto Quarterly 75.4 (2005): 943-56.
• "'The Various Modes of Nature's Least Admirable Workes': or, The Collected Dunciad," Lumen 23 (2004): 91-114.

Editions

• Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies: or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731), contributing ed. Darryl P. Domingo (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2013). 158pp.
• "Appendix: Critical Texts," ed. Darryl P. Domingo, The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, gen. ed. Brian Corman (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2013): 525-84; reprinted (with several updates) in The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama, 2nd edition, gen. eds. Diana Solomon and David Weston (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2024): 885-930.