Joanna Picciotto, an Assistant Professor in the English Department, is working on a book project entitled "Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England." This study investigates how the classical figure of the contemplative became the modern intellectual laborer. Taking into account authors like John Milton and Andrew Marvell, as well as revolutionary groups like the Diggers and establishment organizations like the Royal Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, Picciotto shows how the experimental cast of the early modern era shaped the modern image of the intellectual as one who, as she puts it, “intervenes in the world by expanding the realm of the visible.”