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 Ph.D. focused on Laurence Sterne, William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Charles Dickens, looking at notions of eccentricity, character, and non-conformity in the context of both contemporary empirical philosophy and modern psychoanalysis. My first monograph, Writing Eccentricity: Characters and Forms of Minority, Johnson to Dickens jointly concerns a particular literary figure—the eccentric—and the correlative aesthetic category—eccentricity. It is the first book to substantially address eccentricity as an aesthetic category, as well as contextualising its emergence in the rise of empiricism, scepticism, ideas of originality, new conceptions of humour, and anxieties around the mental pathology of solitary types.
I am also working on two new projects both of which explore ‘association’ and ‘associationism’ in relation to literature. A monograph project thinks about the role played by association 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. While ‘association’ is now closely linked with Freud’s technique of ‘free association’, which invents a new context for a foundational idea, this project charts its importance for the literature, aesthetics, and philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. With Dr Louis Klee, I am also working on a co-editorial project, The Associative Imagination, which provides the first dedicated account of the idea of ‘association’ in the entangled histories of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis: from Classical antiquity to the contemporary world.
My writing has appeared in journals such as Victorian Poetry, Romanticism, Studies in Romanticism, Textual Practice and The Cambridge Quarterly (for which I co-edited a special issue in early 2023). In summer 2024, I curated an exhibition and series of events about the novelist and memoirist Christopher Isherwood. Other recent work explores the unexamined influence of Dickens on Isherwood, poetic allusion in the work of John Clare, ‘sibling logic’ and Romanticism, dreams and dream-writing in psychoanalysis and contemporary fiction, 'liking' as a critical term in relation to the work of Jane Austen, and a meditation on scale and close reading in Hardy’s fiction.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
'Character', in The Oxford Handbook to Jane Austen, ed. Freya Johnston and John Mullan (Oxford University Press)
'Clare's Byronic Impersonation', in Poetic Allusion in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. James Williams and Jane Wright
'Dreaming Lydia Davis', in Essays on Lydia Davis, eds. Lola Boorman and Julie Tanner (University of Iowa Press)
‘“The set is now broken”: Sibling Influence in the Work of Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth’, Textual Practice [forthcoming 2025]
'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.
