Having recently completed Codex Poetics (see below), I continue to think about questions of how literature becomes political and how the interplay between poetics and the materiality of literary formats helps shape literary experience extending from the Romantic period to the twenty-first century. I am especially intrigued by literary depictions of reading-while-walking and am writing an essay on the topic. I’m also interested in the literary imagination of learning to read and other aspects of literacy in the Romantic period. For the volume William Hazlitt in Context (eds. Charles Mahoney and Ian Balfour), I’m working on a small essay on the topic of gender relations. Finally, I’m returning to a project on John Keats and the gothic, inspired by experiences teaching gothic literature at the University of Manchester (2016-2020).

Codex Poetics: Romantic Books and the Politics of Reading

This project was supported by a pilot grant at the John Rylands Research Institute in 2019 and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2022-23.

Exploring a range of literary genres in book form from the 1770s to the 1830s, Codex Poetics: Romantic Books and the Politics of Reading asks what roles the format of the bound book and its poetic figuration on the page play–and how they play off one another–to create a politics of reading. This project includes readings of works by Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Olaudah Equiano, William Godwin, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ignatius Sancho, and Phillis Wheatley.

Codex Poetics extends my interest in time and the imagination of multiple possibilities–which I first explored in Modernity’s Mist (Fordham UP 2016)–to an exploration of the interplay between Romantic poetics and material formats. It revisits the Romantic period as a moment, marked by abolitionist movements and mass print, when the bound book was imagined as a technology of political possibility. Methodologically, the project combines histories of reading and book theory with literary formalism to explore the play of meaning between poetics and format, and it brings more conventionally ‘Romantic’ authors into conversation with those of the Black Atlantic.

Keynotes

“Open Books.” British Association for Romantic Studies conference, delivered online due to Covid, June 2020.

“Vanishing Books, Cockney Poetics.” The Keats Foundation Conference, London, May 2019

Recent Papers/Invited Lectures/Residencies (2019-2025)

Wordsworth Summer Conference: “William Hazlitt in the 1820s: Bibliopolitics Against Apostasy.” Rydal Hall, Lake District, UK, August 4-9, 2025.

Public talk: “Keats Encounters the Shakespeare Folio.” Palace Green Library, Durham, September 25, 2025.

Visiting Scholar, Department of English, Clemson University, USA. November 13-15, 2024.

Visiting Scholar, Department of English, University of Miami, Coral Gables, USA. October 16-17, 2024.

Writer-in-Residence, Department of English, Flagler College, St. Augustine, USA, autumn 2024.

Kenan Distinguished Speaker Series: “On the Happiness of Not Having a Choice .” Department of English, Flagler College, St. Augustine, USA, September 16, 2024.

Stuart Curran Bicentennials Symposium. Performing Politics. New York University, USA, October 25, 2024.

‘Letitia Elizabeth Landon in The New Monthly Magazine’. RSVP conference, Stirling, Scotland, UK, June 13-15, 2024.

RSAA conference, Melbourne, Australia, December, 2023.

‘Romantic Bibliopolitics: Ignatius Sancho and William Hazlitt’. Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies Seminar. Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK, 19 October 2023.

‘Scrapbook Poetics’ at Special Collections Museum, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, 14 September 2023.

‘Typographical Antiquities’ roundtable. Department of English, University of Edinburgh, 21 April 2023.

‘Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the Making of a Common Literature’ at the Middle Modernity Seminar Series, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 17 November 2022. further info/details

‘Romantic Contingency and the Poetics of Page Limits’ at the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois, Chicago, 21 September 2022. further info/details

“Books, Reading, and the Romanticism of Holding Together: Hazlitt and Equiano.” BARS/NASSR, Liverpool, August 2022.

Response to Arden Hegele’s Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading (OUP, 2022) for ‘First Books’ Panel, BARS/NASSR, Liverpool, August 2022.

Invited contribution to “Don Juan at 200″ panel, sponsored by the Byron Society of America, MLA conference in Washington DC, January 2022.

“The Unforeseeable in Repeat Reading.” Panel organised by the Prose Fiction Studies Forum. MLA conference in Washington DC, January 2022.

Invited Talk: “Letitia Landon: The Poetics and Politics of the Page.” Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, November 2021.

Invited talk: “A Theory of Aesthetic Attachments: Hazlitt and his Books.” Inventions of the Text series, Durham University, 2 June 2021.

Invited Seminar. “Politics of Literature” Series at the University of Lille, France. Originally scheduled for April 2020. (Postponed due to Covid and delivered online 15 April 2021.)

Invited Seminar. “Codex Poetics: Letitia Landon and the Politics of the Page.” Literature and its Formats Symposium at the University of Copenhagen, November 2019.

Invited Talk. “Forms of Beauty and Old Books: Wordsworth and Hazlitt on the Time of Reading.” Hazlitt Day School. London, September 2019.

Invited Seminar. ‘Reading Keats with Rancière’. London-Paris Romanticism Seminar, International Panel with Caroline Bertonèche (Grenoble), Senate House, London. March 2019

“Reading as Uprising: Landon, Keats, Rancière,” MLA Chicago, January 2019

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Photo: Rosie. At a Newcastle hotel in the midst of moving from Manchester to Durham, summer 2020.