I am a romanticist in the Department of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In addition to offering an annual course in British Romantic literature and an occasional seminar in Blake or Byron and the Shelleys, my teaching covers a diverse range of departmental course offerings--from basic composition for first-year students, through survey and genre courses, to a course in Research and Writing for English majors and graduate seminars in Prosody, Poetics, and Close Reading and in Bibliography and Methods of Research.
My research focuses primarily on Regency period radicalism, covering especially the poetry of Shelley and Byron as well as lesser-known radical writers, printers, and publishers like William Hone, Richard Carlile, Thomas Wooler, William Cobbett, and others. Theoretically considered, my work focuses on the interchange between literary texts and other forms of more immediately topical writing, on the influence of censorship-- both direct and indirect--on literary form, and more recently on writing, history, and antiquarianism in the late romantic period.
Some indication of the paths of my research can be gleaned from this short listing of publications and current projects:
Print:
"Current Bibliography." Keats-Shelley Journal 53 (2004): 196-226.
"Current Bibliography." Keats-Shelley Journal 52 (2003): 244-81.
"Verbal Jujitsu: The Tactics of Satirical Conflict," The Satiric Eye, ed. Steven E. Jones. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 173-84.
"Private Visions/Public Responsibilities: The Alastor Poet," A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project, ed. Darby Lewes. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 63-80.
"Current Bibliography." Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 241-78.
"Current Bibliography." Keats-Shelley Journal 50 (2001): 202-51.
"Current Bibliography." Keats-Shelley Journal 49 (2000): 129-81.
"Spreading the (Radical) Word: William Hone's Liturgical Parodies of 1817." Radicalism and Revolution in Britain 1775-1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Thomis. Ed. Michael T. Davis. London and New York: Macmillan, St. Martin's, 1999. 143-56.
"John Murray, William Hone, and the Uses of Byron." Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press. Ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. 192-202.
"William Hone." British Reform Writers. Ed. Gary Kelly and Edd Applegate. Dictionary of Literary Biography. 158. Detroit: Gale, 1996. 158-68.
"Queen Mab, the Law of Libel, and the Forms of Shelley's Politics." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 94 (1995): 1-18.
"Censorship, Violence, and Political Rhetoric: The Revolt of Islam in Its Time." Keats-Shelley Journal 43 (1994): 98-116.
"The Entropics of Discourse: Michael Harper's Debridement and the Myth of the Hero." Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990): 417-40.
Electronic Publications:
Romantic Circles Bibliography is a frequently updated listing of recently published books relevant to the study of romanticism.
The Political House that Jack Built, an electronic edition of William Hone and George Cruikshank's illustrated satire of 1819, appears on the Romantic Circles Website.
The William Hone BioText, an online project combining a biography of William Hone together with a substantial cache of bibliographical, historical, and archival and other textual materials. This site is both a contribution to the growing body of scholarship on William Hone (and on early nineteenth-century print culture more generally) and a contribution to the theory of biographical writing and historiography. Some sense of the project's scope can be gathered from the documents available online at www.uab.edu/english/hone.
The Every-Day Book is a free-standing electronic edition of a serial miscellany that Hone compiled and published in 1825-26. The edition, still in progress, is currently "housed" in the Hone BioText noted above.
Shorter Pieces:
Review of Writings of the Luddites, edited by Kevin Binfield. Romanticism on the Net, http://www.ron.umontreal.ca, forthcoming.
Review of Regency Radical: Selected Writings of William Hone, edited by David A. Kent and D. R. Ewen. Romantic Circles Reviews 9.1 (2007): 6 pars. February 2007. <http://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews/current/hone_w07.html>.
Review of British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789-1832, by Gary Dyer. Studies in Romanticism 40.4 (2001): 617-20.
Review of Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle, by Jeffrey Cox. European Romantic Review 11.4 (Fall 2000): 467-71.
Review of Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England by Joss Marsh. Criticism 41.4 (Fall 1999): 550-53.
Review of Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England by Aled Jones and Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England by Kevin Gilmartin. Victorian Studies 42.1 (1998/1999): 151-54.
Review of Shelley's Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority by Steven E. Jones. European Romantic Review 8 (Fall 1997): 464-68.
Review of The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art by Brennan O'Donnell. South Atlantic Review 61 (1996): 134-36.
"William Hone." Encyclopedia of British Humorists. Ed. Steven H. Gale. New York: Garland Press, 1996. (Vol. 1, pp. 531-35).
Excerpt from "The Entropics of Discourse: Michael Harper's Debridement and the Myth of the Hero." Modern Black Writers. Ed. Steven R. Serafin. New York: Continuum, 1995.
Review of Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822 by Marcus Wood. SHARP News 4 (Winter 1995): 4-5.
Review of Shelley's Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): 595-97.
Review of Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Culture by Jerome Christensen. Nineteenth-Century Studies 8 (1994): 126-28.
"Censorship," "William Cobbett," "William Hone," and "The Society for the Suppression of Vice." Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Britain from the 1780s to the 1830s. Ed. Laura Dabundo. New York: Garland Press and London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992.
Other Projects and Positions:
I am the Associate Editor in charge of the Romantics section of the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies (ABES), a project undertaken by the Taylor & Francis/Routledge publishing house in Milton Park, UK. ABES is scheduled to go online in late 2007.
I am currently serving as the Director of Graduate Studies and the Director of the Undergraduate Program in the UAB English department.
From 1999 to 2004, I was the official bibliographer for the Keats-Shelley Association of America with the responsibility for compiling and publishing the annual Keats-Shelley Bibliography.