Danielson, Dennis Richard 1949-

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Danielson, Dennis Richard 1949-

PERSONAL:

Born May 8, 1949, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; married Janet Henshaw (a composer). Education: University of Victoria, Canada, B.A., 1972; University of Sussex, England, M.A., 1973; Oxford University, D.Phil. studies; Stanford University, Ph.D., 1979.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, educator. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, instructor, 1979-86; University of British Columbia, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, Canada, professor of English, 1986—, associate head of English department. Visiting professor, University of Bonn, Germany, 1990-91, Yenching Graduate Institute, Beijing, China, 1995, Centre for Science Development, South Africa, 1997.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, 1990; Overseas Research Fellow, 1997.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

(Editor) The Cambridge Companion to Milton, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1989, 2nd edition, 1999.

(Editor) The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking, Perseus Publishers (Cambridge, MA), 2000.

The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution, Walker (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor of articles and essays to numerous professional journals and books.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dennis Richard Danielson is a Canadian professor of English whose literary research led to his first work of nonfiction, the 1982 book Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy. He has additionally served as editor for The Cambridge Companion to Milton. However, Danielson is also involved in research linking the humanities and the sciences, and more specifically, on the history of cosmology. This interest led to his 2000 editorship of The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking, a history of the manner in which Western civilization has looked at and written about the universe.

In his collection of writings, Danielson includes a range of speculations, from religious or sacred texts to modern physics. As Faith L. Justice noted in a Writer review, "Danielson brings a literary sensibility to his millennia-spanning collection." In his eighty-five short chapters, he includes writings from scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, as well as from more literary and philosophical works by Heraclitus, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante Alighieri, Arthur C. Clarke, and George Bernard Shaw. Justice went on to comment that Danielson "succeeds in imposing order on these myriad materials." William Schomaker, writing in Astronomy, observed that "perhaps the most interesting chapters are those that juxtapose the writings of dissimilar individuals." Thus, for example, in one chapter Danielson pairs the writings of theologian John Calvin and astronomer Johannes Kepler; in another, philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and theologian and philosopher Samuel Clarke present divergent views on Newtonian physics. Schomaker concluded that Danielson "triumphs with the successful marriage of religious, literary, and scientific prose under a single cover." Similarly, a reviewer for Report Newsmagazine felt The Book of the Cosmos, while "no easy read," was "interesting, intriguing, inspiring—and above all, not intimidating."