A specialist in eighteenth-century British literature, David Alvarez held positions at the University of Rochester, Davidson College, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis before joining the department in 2006. He is writing two books: an edited collection of essays by public intellectuals and scholars from outside European and American universities on The European Enlightenment Outside the Occident and a study of The Aesthetics of Tolerance in the English Enlightenment, which thinks about the about the rise of religious tolerance less in terms of legal history than in terms of cultural and discursive practices, less in terms of philosophical concepts than in terms of embodied sensibilities. He teaches a wide range of introductory classes, as well as upper-division courses on orientalism, aesthetics and the Enlightenment, the early British novel, and literature and toleration.