Additional Information

Office and Office Hour

Research Interests

I grew up in Witney, West Oxfordshire (UK), and went to my local comprehensive school before becoming the first member of my family to attend university. I was given an award by the Wellcome Trust for attaining the highest grade in the A level history course offered by my exam board for a research project on Zionism and the Russian Revolution.  At Cambridge University (BA), I was awarded a double first and a Foundation Scholarship by my college, before studying at the University of Leeds (MA) and then writing a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London on Immanuel Kant, anthropology and literary theory. After a one-year contract as Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at University College, Dublin, I went back to Leeds to teach for a decade, first as a Lecturer, and then from 2009 Senior Lecturer (the old name for Associate Professor) in Critical and Cultural Theory. I was appointed Associate Professor of Modern English Literature at Geneva in 2015. From 2023-2027, I am serving as Head of the Department of English. I am co-coordinator of the Doctoral Workshop in Modern and Contemporary Literature in English, and Director of the programme in English Language and Literature of the organisation that funds that workshop, CUSO.

I am a Romanticist with abiding interests in aesthetics, political theory, the history of close reading, literary form, race, gender and sexuality, nature and technology. Most of all, I am passionate about teaching, and being in the classroom is the aspect of my job that I enjoy the most. My research and teaching come together in my interest in how Romantic ideas of aesthetic education are currently re-emerging in conversations about possible futures for the humanities in a time of crisis. I’m also animated by questions about how humanities scholarship can work towards a mode of study of aesthetic practice which is truly planetary in reach, and no longer determined by Eurocentric modes of knowing. My heroes in this endeavour include Gayatri Spivak, Paolo Freire, and just about anyone in the academy who stands up to inert and embedded forms of privilege. This interest has also recently taken me and my colleague Dr Patrick Jones to Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, to develop a conversation with colleagues there about poetry, creativity and the transnational in the age of AI (funded by the Geneva-Yonsei fund). My current book project based around this work, On Aesthetic Education, is under advanced contract with SUNY press.

I’m keen to make what we do in the academy of real-world import. As a union member I am committed to the struggle for more equitable and transparent structures in public education. I’m also project lead for “Landscapes of the Mind”, an SNSF Agora project which brings refugees and migrants into areas of natural beauty in Switzerland and Britain to help develop mindfulness and creativity, under the tutelage of the Romantic poets, novelists and political theoreticians who wrote about these locations, and in dialogue with contemporary writers, artists and mindfulness practitioners. You can find out more about the project and watch a videocast of our first workshop here.

 

PUBLICATIONS

Books

Hannah Arendt (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Translated into Korean, Japanese, simplified Chinese and Arabic.

Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy: Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary Theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2006; paperback edition published 2008).

Editorial Work

“British Romanticism and Europe”, European Romantic Review 36:4 (2025), co-ed. with David Duff and Patrick Vincent (forthcoming).

"Contours of Learning: On Spivak", Parallax 17:3 (Summer 2011).

Futures of the Archive, series co-ed. with Arthur Bradley, six volumes published (Rowman and Littlefield/ Bloomsbury).

Essays/Book Chapters

Introduction to “British Romanticism and Europe”, European Romantic Review 36:4 (2025, forthcoming).

“I.A. Richards and Cybernetics”, Logic, Modern Literature and Artificial Intelligence, ed. by Sam Macduff and Rachel Falconer (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

“Interpretation and Mistakes”, Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” @ 60, ed. by Nell Wasserstrom, ASAP/Review (March 2025).

"The Crisis of Enlightenment", in The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature, ed. by Patrick Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 188-220.

“Kant’s Critique of Idealised Tahitians”, Syncretic 2 (2022), 47-55.

"Keats, Peterloo and Seriality", Peterloo at 200: Histories, Narratives, Representations, ed. by Anna Anselmo and Marco Canani, The Keats-Shelley Review 35:2 (September 2021), 158-168.

"Wordsworth and the Poetry of Posture", ELH  85 (2018), 941-972.

“even now,/ Ev’n now: Coleridge’s Interval”, The Challenge of Change, SPELL 36 (2018), ed. by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Hilpert, 143-160.

"Frankenstein, roman familial", translated by Oran McKenzie, in David Spurr and Nicolas Ducimetière, eds, "Frankenstein": Crée des Ténèbres (Paris: Gallimard/ Fondation Martin Bodmer, 2016), 15-21.

"Stoicism and Romantic Literature", in The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition, ed. by John Sellars (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 303-318.

"Mary Wollstonecraft's Religious Characters", in Called to Civil Existence: Mary Wollstonecraft's 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman', ed. by Enit K. Steiner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 131-154.

"Wordsworth and Charles Le Brun: Expression, Sensation, Colour", in Grasmere 2013: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference, ed. by Richard Gravil (Penrith: Humanities Ebooks, 2013), 50-62.

"Wordsworth, Kant, Fanaticism and Humanity", in The Poetic Enlightenment: Poetry and Human Science in Eighteenth-Century Thought, ed. by Rowan Boyson and Tom Jones (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 153-167.

"Hannah Arendt, Violence and Vitality", Theorizing Violence, ed. by Jane Kilby, The European Journal of Social Theory 16:2 (August, 2013), 357-376.

"New Mass Movements: Hannah Arendt, Literature and Politics", On the Move: Mobilities in English Language and Literature, ed. by Annette Kern-Stähler and David Britain, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 27 (Tübingen: Narr, 2012), 39-52.

"Romanticism and Unhappiness: Melancholy as a Romantic Legacy", in Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics, ed. by Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 245-259.

“The Lesson of Gayatri Spivak”, Parallax 17:3 (Summer 2011), 84-97.

Introduction to "Contours of Learning: On Spivak", Parallax 17:3 (Summer 2011), 1-3.

"Hannah Arendt's Tactlessness: Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem", Arendt After Modernity, ed. by Devorah Baum, Stephen Bygrave, and Stephen Morton, New Formations 71 (Spring 2011), 79-94.

"Mary Wollstonecraft and the Reserve of Reason", Studies in Romanticism 45:1 (Spring 2006), 3-24, republished in Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Jane Moore (Farnham, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).

"Kant, Herder, and the Question of Philosophical Anthropology", Textual Practice 19:2 (June 2005), 219-238.

Reviews

Ewan Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 41:2 (May 2018), 345-346.

Timothy Michael, British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason (Johns Hopkins, 2016), The Keats-Shelley Journal 66 (2017), 173-174.

Emma Peacocke, Romanticism and the Museum (Palgrave, 2015), Journal of British Studies 54:4 (October 2015), 1057-8.

Richard Adelman, Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic 1750-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38:2 (June 2015), 308-309.

Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), The Keats-Shelley Review 29:1 (April 2015), 60-62.

Rowan Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Romanticism 21:1 (April 2015), 103 -105.

Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhling, eds, Wordsworth's Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience (Palgrave, 2009), BARS Bulletin (June 2011), 39-40.

Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Southern Humanities Review 39:4 (Summer 2006), 288-291.

Ono Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (University of Toronto Press, 2003), Southern Humanities Review 39:3 (Fall 2005), 378-381.