Prof Philip Connell, Selwyn

pjc1007@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am a Professor of Literature and History in the Faculty of English, and a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Selwyn College. I was educated at the University of Liverpool and completed my Ph.D. at King's College, Cambridge. I've held Research Fellowships at St John's College, Cambridge and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH); I'm a member of the Research Group for Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies and an editor of The Review of English Studies with responsibility for the Restoration to Romantic period.

Research Interests

Principal research interests in literature, politics, and intellectual history between 1650 and 1840. Previous publications have included studies of the political and economic thought of British Romantic writers; popular culture in the early nineteenth century; the history of the book; poetry and national identity; literature and science; canon-formation and literary commemoration; poetry, politics and religion. Currently working on revolution and cultural memory in Romantic Britain.

Areas of Graduate Supervision

I've supervised Ph.D. candidates working on a wide range of topics in the long eighteenth century, and would welcome inquiries from prospective students; I also teach for the Cambridge M.Phil. in English Studies.

Selected Publications

• 'Edmund Burke and the First Stuart Revolution', Journal of British Studies, 59 (2020), 463-94. [Open access.]
• '"A voice from over the Sea": Shelley's Mask of Anarchy, Peterloo, and the English Radical Press', Review of English Studies, 70 (2019), 716-31. Also published in short form in Times Literary Supplement (16 Aug. 2019).
• 'Marvell and the Church' in The Oxford Handbook of Andew Marvell, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Edward Holberton (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• 'Wordsworth's "Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty" and the British Revolutionary Past', English Literary History, 85 (2018), 747-74.
• 'Writing Religion and the Genealogy of the Literary Aesthetic', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41 (2018), 321-30.
• Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• 'Hobbes and Davenant: Poetry as Civil Science' in The Poetic Enlightenment: Poetry and Human Science, 1650-1820, ed. Tom Jones and Rowan Boyson (Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 63-74.
• 'Marvell, Milton and the Protectoral Church Settlement', Review of English Studies, 62 (2011), 562-93.
• 'Newtonian Physico-Theology and the Varieties of Whiggism in James Thomson's The Seasons', Huntington Library Quarterly, 72 (2009), 1-28.
• Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland, ed. Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• 'British Identites and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England', The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 161-92.
• 'Death and the Author: Westminster Abbey and the Meanings of the Literary Monument', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38 (2005), 557-85.
• Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• 'Wordsworth, Malthus, and the 1805 Prelude', Essays in Criticism, 50 (2000), 242-67.
• 'Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain', Representations, 71 (2000), 24-47.