Dr Eliza Haughton-Shaw, Corpus Christi

ehh24@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am an Early-Career Research Fellow based at Corpus Christi College (2021-2025). I was educated at a comprehensive school in York and went from there to complete a BA at the University of Oxford in 2015, and an MLitt at the University of Glasgow in 2016. I completed my AHRC-funded PhD in Eighteenth Century and Romantic Literature at Cambridge in 2021. 

Research Interests

I work primarily on Romanticism and the long eighteenth century, combining interests in literature with Enlightenment epistemology and empirical and psychoanalytic psychology. My doctoral thesis drew on recent academic interest in eccentric character, addressing the figure of the eccentric across a variety of literary case studies, from Sterne through to Dickens, and combining an interest in character with discussions of how form and genre contribute to eccentricity as a stylistic signature.

I am currently finishing a monograph based on this research, titled Writing Eccentricity: Character and Form, Sterne to Dickens. A new book project, Association and the Romantic Essay, thinks about the role association plays in the small-scale and improvised forms pioneered by the Romantic essayists: Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, and the Romantic Modernist, Woolf. This is a literary study of what happens in essays, but it brings together philosophical concerns with psychological ones, understanding association as a crucial term across disciplines. It intertwines readings of individual writers with a study of the concepts evoked by Romantic association - such as quotation, rewriting and rereading - which complicate divisions between past and present selves, private and shared realities, or first- and second-hand experiences.

Other research interests include play, object-relations, association, habit , character, nostalgia, Nonsense literature, the essay / essayism, British Romantic poetry and prose. I have a passionate interest in psychoanalysis (especially Christopher Bollas, Sigmund Freud, Andre Green, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott). I'm always happy to hear from students who share an interest in any of these areas.

Selected Publications

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

'Dreaming Lydia Davis', in Essays on Lydia Davis, eds. Lola Boorman and Julie Tanner [forthcoming 2024]

'Habit, Romanticism, and the Literary Imagination' [co-written with Hannah Tran], The Cambridge Quarterly, 51:3 (2022), pp. 188-206

'Charles Lamb’s Imperfect Solitudes', Romanticism, 28:3 (2022), pp. 233-245

'"Antic Dispositions": Lear and Dickens', Victorian Poetry, 58:2 (2020), pp. 135-149

Special Issues

Habit and Romanticism, special issue of The Cambridge Quarterly, ed. Eliza Haughton-Shaw and Hannah Tran, 51:3 (2022)

Reviews/Interviews

'"A Tissue of Truth and Fiction": Lamb's 'Elia' and The London Magazine', The London Magazine. January 2023.

'The Eccentricity of Lydia Davis's 'Essays'', The London Magazine. August 2020.

‘Writing Hunger’: an interview with Emma Donoghue. The London Magazine. January 2020.

‘Defying Gravity’, a review of Josh Cohen, Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. The London Magazine. January 2020.

Conferences

'Habit in the Long Eighteenth Century'. A virtual conference hosted by UCL (February 20th-25th), co-organised with Desmond Huthwaite and Hannah Tran.

'Happiness: Enlightenment to Present'. A two-day conference at King's College, Cambridge (19th-20th October 2019), co-organised with Megan Beech and Alex Hobday.