Christopher Johnson

Christopher D. Johnson, when he is not meandering on Warburg’s Wanderstrassen, teaches Spanish early modern literature at UCLA.

Previously he taught comparative literature at Harvard University and early modern English literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought(Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, with Harvard University Press, 2010) and Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2012). He also translated theSelected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo: A Bilingual Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

A native New Yorker, he received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. Not always a scholar, he has also worked as a bread baker, farmer, and journalist. Inspired in part by Warburg, he is currently writing a book on the “kinds” or genres of early modern encyclopedism.