Welcome. I’m a British Romanticist whose research and teaching explore the intersections of affect, aesthetics and ethics in poetry, criticism and the occasional novel. I’m a she/her person who wears a lot of hats.
I feel privileged to have been trained at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish Nation), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation). I’m a white settler Canadian of European (Austrian) descent, and from 2017-2020, I was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, on traditional Seminole land.
In 2020, I began a new appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Regina. Situated on the territories of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, and the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation, URegina is on Treaty 4 lands with a presence in Treaty 6.
From 2019 to 2021 I was a co-PI on the NEH-funded Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Project, which has created a fully-searchable, publicly-accessible digital edition, with functionality comparable to other modern, scholarly dictionaries.
I’m Book Reviews Editor at the journal Prose Studies. Interested in reviewing a book for us? Get in touch!
My book, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation (Stanford University Press, 2022), explores how Romanticism’s provocative poetic forms index a critical refusal to use art to move subjects towards what Raymond Williams calls “dominant structures of feeling.” You can find an essay drawn from this project, on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s disappointed reading, in Studies in Romanticism.
Collaborations and Criticism
Keats-Shelley Journal 200 Years, 50 Voices Issue
Why read the Romantics? Why now? My contribution to a collection of “flash essays” on what’s next for Romanticism.
Women Readers of Keats
The mindset of “a Man of Achievement especially in Literature,” according to the poet Keats, must be possessed of Negative Capability, a quality of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” What, then, of a woman of literary achievement? I contributed a chapter to this collection (edited by two of my favourite Keatsians, Brian Rejack and Michael Theune) that explores the gendering of Negative Capability’s influence.
Book Reviews
I like writing book reviews! Scholarly reviews have appeared in Studies in Romanticism (2016); Modern Philology (2016); Romantic Circles Praxis: Reviews & Receptions (2016, 2019, 2020); and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2021).
For reviews of contemporary Canadian poetry, see Capilano Review (2017), Toronto Review of Books (2017) and EVENT Magazine (2021).
Diversions
Once upon a time, I wrote a list for McSweeney’s. I signed up for the Plain Pleasures Newsletter and never regretted it. I agreed to spill my secret literary likes in good company. I made some discoveries and then lost them again.
Carmen Faye Mathes 