Rate My Professor David Mazella

David Mazella is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College, M.A. from Columbia University, and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Mazella specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and has published on topics including the cultural and conceptual history of cynicism, as well as articles on Laurence Sterne, Thomas Hobbes, and George Lillo. His book The Making of Modern Cynicism was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2007. He has held fellowships at the Huntington Library in 1993 and the Thomas Reid Institute at the University of Aberdeen in 1998, and received support from the Whiting Foundation from 1994 to 1995 along with several internal grants from the University of Houston.

Mazella served as a member of the UH Faculty Senate and was one of the founders of the UH Center for Teaching Excellence in 2010, serving as its Director until spring 2013. In 2014, he received the University of Houston's Distinguished Leadership in Teaching Excellence Award. His research interests include eighteenth-century British literature and culture, the history of the British Empire, the historical reception of Enlightenment thought, the history of rhetoric, literary criticism, and critical theory, as well as historical and contemporary pedagogy. He is currently working on a literary history of the year 1771, examining Anglophone writings from metropolitan and colonial settings such as London, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and Kingston, Jamaica. Mazella has also published on curricular reform, inquiry-based pedagogy in literary studies, and the political stakes of assessment in higher education.