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Travis DeCook

Associate Professor

• B.A. Honours, M.A. (University of Victoria), Ph.D. (University of Toronto)
• Email Travis DeCook

Research Interests

• Early Modern literature
• Religion and Theology
• Intellectual and Cultural History
• Theories of Secularity and Modernity
• The Bible

Current Research

My research critically engages concepts of modernity and secularity in light of cultural and religious activity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period commonly appealed to as secular modernity’s historical source. My current project, The Secularization of God and the Nature of the Human Person in the Seventeenth Century explores the emergence of idiosyncratic conceptions of God in the seventeenth century and how they impinged upon understandings of personhood. The project considers how traditional attributes of God within Christian theology—particularly divine simplicity, eternity, and triunity—were increasingly rejected in the period and replaced by a logic rooted in finite, creaturely reality, which in turn played a role in the development of distinctly modern and secular anthroplogies. The project examines how these shifts represent a significant diminishment in the scope of human possibility. The project centres on figures such as Descartes, Milton, Hobbes, Newton, and Traherne.

This project follows upon my book The Origins of the Bible and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which challenges prevailing ways of conceiving the Bible’s relationship to modernity’s fundamental religious transformations. It explores how accounts of the Bible’s origins, and not only engagement with the Bible’s contents, served varied and unexpected functions in the early modern period. Writers at the time exploited a newly heightened tension between the Bible’s divine and human dimensions in order to craft innovative narratives of the agencies and processes through which the Bible came into existence and was transmitted. I investigate how these accounts of Scripture’s production and transmission were taken up beyond a narrowly-circumscribed theological discourse, and were deployed as the theological basis for wide-reaching arguments about the proper ordering of human life. This project reflects on the implications of this overlooked dimension of the early modern Bible’s history for theories of secularity in our own time.

Honours and Awards

• FASS Research Award for Junior Faculty 2010
• FASS Research Grant 2010
• SSHRC Institutional Research Grant 2009
• Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship 2006

Books

(Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Books Co-edited

Co-edited, with Donald Beecher, Andrew Wallace and Grant Williams,  (University of Toronto Press, 2015).

Co-edited, with Alan Galey,  (Routledge, 2011).

Articles and Book Chapters

ELH 92.1 (2025)

Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Mark Kaethler and Grant Williams (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

 Textual Cultures 16.1 (2023)

 Political Theology 24.4 (2023)

 Moreana 59.2 (2022)

Literature and Theology 32.3 (2018).

 Religion and Literature 47.1 (2015)

Studies in Philology 110.1 (2013).

University of Toronto Quarterly 81.1 (2012).

co-authored with Alan Galey, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book.

Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book.

The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700. Ed. James Dougal Fleming. Ashgate, 2011.

Studies in Philology 105.1 (2008): 103-122.

Studies in English Literature 48.1 (Winter 2008): 1-22.

Moreana 169 (2007): 226-248.

Studies in Canadian Literature 27.2 (2002): 71-87.

Presentations

“The Gift of Being: Traherne’s Virtue Ethics and Gratitude to God.” Canadian Society of Renaissance Studies Conference, Toronto, June 2025.

“Traherne’s Theological Anthropology and the Love for God.” Workshop presentation. Renaissance Society of America, Boston, March 2025.

“Faith Comes by Hearing: Hobbes Quoting Paul.” Roundtable presentation. Renaissance Society of America, Boston, March 2025.

“Milton, the Denial of Divine Simplicity, and the Nature of the Human Person.” Sixteenth Century Conference, Toronto, November 2024.

“Hobbes’s Sovereign and the Theology of Images.” Canadian Society of Renaissance Studies Conference, Montreal, June 2024.

“Donne’s Holy Sonnet 13 and the Phenomenology of the Image of Christ.” Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Baltimore, October 2023.

“Milton and the Political Theology of Bible Reading.” Renaissance Society of America, San Juan, March 2023.

“Eschatological Restoration and Attention to Nature in Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book.’” Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Minneapolis, October 2022.

“The Materiality of the Bible in the Divine Economy: Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book.’” Canadian Society of Renaissance Studies, online, May 2022.

“Imagination, Religion, and the Private and Public Spheres in Hobbes and Spinoza.”Renaissance Society of America, Dublin, April 2022.

“The Beatific Vision and the Mortal Person in Hobbes and Traherne.” Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, March 2019.

“The Afterlife and the Human Person in Hobbes’s Leviathan.” Renaissance Society of America, New Orleans, March 2018.

“The Origins of the Bible and Early Modern Political Theology.” Invited talk given to The Bible in the Renaissance Conference, Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, May 2017.

“William Tyndale’s Polemical Representation of God and Modernity’s Domestication of Transcendence.” Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, March 2017.

“William Tyndale, the Teleology of the Christian Life, and Genealogies of Modernity.” Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, University of Calgary, May 2016.

“’A Removed Space’: Theories of Print in Contemporary Treatments of the Reformation Bible.” Sixteenth Century Conference, New Orleans, October 2014.

“De Doctrina Christiana, Miltonic Freedom, and the Providential Immanence of the Bible’s Textual History.”  Canada Milton Seminar, University of Toronto, May 2014.

“The Political Theology of Biblical Production:  Milton, Hobbes, Spinoza.”  Renaissance Society of America Conference, New York, March 2014.

“Tyndale’s Theology of Scripture and the Subject of Secularity.”  Sixteenth Century Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 2013.

“‘Divinity, Adieu!’: Doctor Faustus’s Secular Bible.”  Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, University of Victoria, June 2013.

“The Suspension of Providence: Textual Contingency in Thomas More’s Attack on Sola Scriptura.”  Renaissance Society of America, San Diego, CA, April 2013.

“Early Modern Secularity and Francis Bacon’s Theology of Revelation.”  Renaissance Society of America, Washington, DC, March 2012.

Graduate Courses

ENGL 6002: Doctoral Proseminar
ENGL 5005: M.A. Seminar
ENGL 6000: The Production of Literature

Graduate Supervisions

• DRP supervisor for Ali Ahmed. DRP title: “Poetic Truth: Lewis, Barfield, and the Karamazovs”
• 2012-13. MA Thesis supervisor for Christopher Jenkins. Thesis title: “The Cross Pressure of Flannery O’Connor”