Prof Ross Wilson, Emmanuel
rmw24@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I was born in Salford and brought up in Manchester, where I attended Philips High School and Bury College. I was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University College London before completing my doctorate at Cambridge in 2004. I held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel (2004-7) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of English, Cambridge (2007-9) before being appointed to a Lectureship in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 2009. I returned to Cambridge in 2013 as Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English. I am now Professor of the History and Theory of Criticism and a Fellow of Emmanuel College.
I work chiefly on the history, theory, and practice of literary criticism and on Romantic and Victorian poetry. My latest monograph is Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750–2020 (Oxford University Press, 2023) and my edited collection, Percy Shelley in Context, with 40 contributors from seven countries, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. My writing has appeared in ELH, New Literary History, New German Critique, Romanticism, European Romantic Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. I have been on BBC 4 talking about Alexander Pope and the Thames, on BBC Radio 4 talking about Lord Byron as a student, and on ABC's Late Night Live discussing the apparent demise of the book blurb.
You can see my full CV here.
Research Interests
The history, theory, and practice of literary criticism; Romanticism; poetry in English from 1750 to the present; literature, politics, and ethics; literature and theology.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I welcome enquiries concerning postgraduate supervision in the areas suggested by 'Research Interests' above. Examples of the topics of dissertations that I have supervised or examined at doctoral level (not all at Cambridge) include: Percy Shelley and enlightenment; the late nineteenth-century essay; Henry James and the sonic imagination; epic, Romanticism, and the theory of mind; Hegel and reading; Romanticism and scale. I have supervised dissertations on a still wider range of topics at M.Phil. level.
Selected Publications
Books (author)
Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750–2020 (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013; pbk 2016)
Theodor Adorno (Routledge, 2007)
Chinese (Mandarin) translation: Chongqing University Press, 2016
Turkish translation: Yaşamın Diyalektiği: Adorno’yu Anlamak [Dialectic of Life: Understanding Adorno] (FOL, 2023)
Subjective Universality in Kant’s Aesthetics (Peter Lang, 2007)
Books (editor)
Percy Shelley in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (Routledge, 2009; pbk 2011)
Articles and chapters
Preface and ‘English Literature to 1792’, in Percy Shelley in Context, ed. by Ross Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 2025), pp. xix–xxiii and 67–73
‘Clare and the Sublime’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Clare, ed. by Sarah Houghton-Walker (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 60–74
‘“The Most Vivid Poetry”: The Bible and/as Poetry in Shelley and Byron’ and ‘Passages and Commentary: Shelley and Byron’, in The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and the Book, ed. by Stephen Prickett with Elisabeth Jay, 5 vols (London: T&T Clark, 2024), IV: Enlightenment to Romanticism, pp. 359–412
‘More than Justice: Balance and Persuasion in Hazlitt’, in Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism, ed. by Yasmin Solomonescu and Stefan H. Uhlig (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 86–102
‘Shelley in the Overgrowth’, in Shelley for Our Times, ed. by Kate Singer and Omar F. Miranda (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 195–213
‘The Postscript’, in Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies, ed. by Charles Martindale and others (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 104–17
‘Hear Here: A Homophone in English Poetry’, English Literary History, 90 (2023), 549–75
Preface to Yaşamın Diyalektiği: Adorno’yu Anlamak [Dialectic of Life: Understanding Adorno] (FOL, 2023), Turkish translation of Theodor Adorno (see above under ‘Books’)
Afterword to special issue: ‘Reading Shelley on the Bicentenary of his Death’, ed. by Will Bowers and Mathelinda Nabugodi, European Romantic Review, 33 (2022), 753–57
‘Strange Designs: Byron, Shelley, and Ottava Rima’, in Byron Among the English Poets, ed. by Claire Bucknell and Matthew Ward (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 172–86
‘“We Manufacture Fun”: Capital and the Production of Affect’, in Affect and Literature, ed. by Alex Houen (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 100–115
‘The Hidden Seeds of Survival’, New Literary History, 49 (2018), 149–63
‘Shelley’s Plato’, in The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Philosophy, ed. by Philip Wilson and Piers Rawling (Routledge, 2018), pp.345–57
‘Ruskin/Browning, Alpenstock/Hatchet’, in The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830–1930: Authorial Work Ethics, ed. by Marcus Waithe and Claire White (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp.81–96
‘Henry James at Any Rate’, Henry James Review, 38 (2017), 250–59
‘Hegel and the Matter of Poetry’, Textual Practice, 31 (2017), 1237–52
‘Reading Habits’, Thinking Verse, 4:2 (2015) http://www.thinkingverse.com/issue04b.html
‘Browning’s Balancing Acts’, in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. by Matthew Bevis (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 337–50
‘The Beautiful and the Sublime’, in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. by George Pattison, Graham Ward, and Nick Adams (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 419–34
‘Clare’s Indistinct Array’, Romanticism, 17 (2011), 148–59
‘New Critical Theory’, in Michael Ryan (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Blackwell Reference Online. http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/book?id=g9781405183123_9781405183123
‘Shelley’s Sounds of Air’, Thinking Verse, 1 (2010), http://www.thinkingverse.com
‘Introduction’, in The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (see above under ‘Books’), pp. 1–12
‘Poetry as Reanimation in Shelley’, in The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (see above under ‘Books’), pp. 125–145
‘Voluptuousness and Asceticism in Adorno’, in ‘Writing Pleasure Now’, special issue of German Life and Letters, ed. by Lucia Ruprecht and Michael Minden, 62 (2009), 270–83
‘Robert Browning’s Compounds’, Literature Compass, 6 (2009), 524–31
‘Dialectical Aesthetics and the Kantian Rettung: On Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, New German Critique, 104 (2008), 55–69
‘Coleridge’s German “Absolutism”’, in Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. by James Vigus and Jane Wright (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 171–87
‘Aesthetics’, in Adorno: Key Concepts, ed. by Deborah Cook (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), pp. 147–60
‘Coleridge and the Life of Language’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 27 (2006), 38–44
Reviews and other writing
Reviews and occasional pieces in: British Journal of Aesthetics; CAM; Cambridge Quarterly; Coleridge Bulletin; The Conversation; Frieze; Keats-Shelley Journal; The Liberal; Literature and Theology; Los Angeles Review of Books; Music & Letters; New Statesman; Radical Philosophy; Review of English Studies; Romantic Circles Reviews and Receptions; Textual Practice; The Times Literary Supplement.
