Joseph Carroll (b. 1949) is a pioneering scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He is currently Curators’ Professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis, where he has taught since 1985.
Evolution and Literary Theory established the field of evolutionary literary studies and critiqued poststructuralist theory for seeing the world as if it were textual and for seeing meaning as undecidable. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature collected the essays from Carroll’s next decade. A second volume, Reading Human Nature, collected later essays. Carroll and colleagues have applied empirical methods—an Internet survey of reader responses—to an evolutionary analysis of British nineteenth century fiction. Carroll edited Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and co-edited volumes 1 and 2 of The Evolutionary Review.