Rate My Professor David Alff

David Alff is an Associate Professor of English and Placement Director in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. Alff's research centers on 17th- and 18th-century Anglophone writing and performance, as well as infrastructure, public works, projects, and projection. He is the author of two monographs: The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660-1730 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), which examines incomplete efforts to advance British society amid revolutions in finance, agriculture, experimental science, and constitutional monarchy; and The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (University of Chicago Press, 2024), the first comprehensive history of the busiest passenger rail line in the Western Hemisphere, detailing its role in shaping regional geography, industry, metropolitan growth, suburban development, and key historical events. He has a third book under contract with the University of Chicago Press, Rights of Way: A Literary Approach to Infrastructure, exploring early modern legal debates on passage rights that influenced road, rail, shipping, and pipeline networks.

Alff has published scholarly articles in leading journals such as Critical Inquiry, ELH, PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century, and Philological Quarterly, including 'Make Way for Infrastructure' (Critical Inquiry, 2021), 'Richard Savage and the Poetry of Public Works' (ELH, 2019), 'Before Infrastructure: The Poetics of Paving in John Gay's Trivia' (PMLA, 2017), and 'Swift's Solar Gourds and the Rhetoric of Projection' (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2014). His public essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Review, Time, Avidly, and Book Post. He is co-editing a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies on infrastructure with Jo Guldi and a volume, Histories of Science, with Danielle Spratt for the University of Virginia Press. Alff has delivered invited lectures at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the University of Iowa.