Welcome. I earned my PhD in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where I studied under the supervision of Dr. Miranda Burgess. Currently, I teach scholarly research and writing at UBC in the Arts Studies in Research and Writing program.
My research areas are Romantic literature and culture in Britain and Europe, and the history and theory of form, aesthetics, and feeling. My doctoral project was the investigation of disappointment as a Romantic critical and aesthetic category, and the dissertation that I wrote, Romantic Descent: Poetry and the Aesthetics of Disappointment, 1790-1820, examines Romantic writers’ experiments with, and their development of, a poetics of reorientation after a loss of attachment to a self-affirming outcome or ideal future. Rather than start anew, such a poetics compels readers to persevere in encounters with difficulty by asking them to strive and struggle in ways both socially oriented and radically negative.
I have published in European Romantic Review and Romantic Circles Praxis (forthcoming), and I have articles under consideration elsewhere. At the moment, I am working on a book project tentatively titled Pivotal Modernity: Romanticism against the Perpetuation of Experience, which investigates Romanticism as a movement paradoxically invested in evading its audiences through form that disrupts expectations in order to account for the ethically uncertain.
Carmen Faye Mathes 