Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

A self-described human ping-pong ball, Michael Suarez teaches on both sides of the Atlantic: at Fordham University in New York City and at Campion Hall and the Faculty of English, Oxford University. Before taking up his present appointment in eighteenth-century English literature, book history, and bibliography, he was a junior research fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford.

While at the Radcliffe Institute, Suarez will work to complete the first volume of a two-volume project, “The Mock Biblical: A Study in English Satire 1660–1830.” Analyzing verbal and visual satires that marshal scriptural quotations, typologies, or tropes, this book will demonstrate the extent to which the mock biblical was an essential weapon in the polemicist’s armory. Studies of eighteenth-century satire conventionally emphasize the importance of mock epic, but this project establishes that the mock biblical was deployed far more widely, not least because the Bible was the lingua franca of the culture.

Suarez is a graduate of Bucknell University, where he majored in biology, English, and sociology. He is a former Marshall Scholar and the recipient of research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also a past president of the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. A Jesuit priest, he holds two master’s degrees from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and two master’s and a doctorate from Oxford.