Joel Lucyszyn, Corpus Christi

Biographical Information

I was educated at a comprehensive school in Leicester and went on to graduate with a BA (Class I with distinction) in English from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 2018, where I was awarded the Gillian and John Beer Prize for my dissertation on Byron’s ecopoetics. The following year I graduated with an MPhil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies (distinction). I am now a second year PhD at Corpus Christi, funded by the AHRC.

Research Interests

The intervention of my doctoral thesis is to suggest that the convening role of Byron's sexuality has not been sufficiently noted in the challenges his poetry poses to ideologies of nature. I examine how a material and discursive experience of incest and sodomy marks an aesthetic difference between Byron and his contemporaries, in England, a difference which informs the reception of Byron as a nature writer (within the period and after). I have become interested in his poetry theory and practice, and how this relates to, revises and contradicts contemporaneous thought on sexuality, language, poetry and the environment - especially in their intersections. 

Areas of interest: ecocriticism; the philosophy of nature; poetry in philosophy; poetic theory; queer theory; sexuality and aesthetics; Romantic poetry and prose; site-writing; object theory and material culture; psychoanalysis; diaspora; posthumanism; Shakespeare. I have a love for English, Scottish and Irish folk music and the work of Byron, Celan, O’Hara and Derrida.