Lewis Todd, Emmanuel

Biographical Information

I read English as an undergraduate at Queen Mary University, graduating in 2018 with First Class Honours and in receipt of the Drapers Company Prize. Following this, and under the auspices of the Gordan Glasgow scholarship, I became a member of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where I completed the MPhil in C18 and Romantic Studies MPhil in 2019. Currently, I am undertaking an AHRC-funded doctoral programme in the Faculty, and remain at Emmanuel College.

Research Interests

My doctoral research focuses on the articulation of scale – poetic, political, scientific – during the Romantic period, with a particular interest in John Clare, William Blake, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The motivation for the project, however, is contemporary, arising from current questions about our capacity to think and act at divergent scales in light of ecological dependence (and collapse). Retaining Clarke and Wittenburg’s astonishment at the ‘virtually infinite rescaling capability of the human imagination’, though sceptical of their lack of emphasis on historical contingency, I seek to elucidate the scalar imagination at the intersection of natural philosophy, technological development, industrial production, and natural-historical inquiry.

I have also written/am interested in writing on the following topics: Romantic literature and Earth sciences; contemporary landscape poetics; the interrelation of history and nature; metaphor and epistemology; Modernist poetry; phenomenology; critical theory; poetic form and its opportunities; etymology/etymologic; poetry and jazz.

Selected Publications

Poetry:

I have published poetry in Eyot (2018), The Vanguard (2019) and Kings Review (2019; forthcoming) 

Conferences:

Wordsworth Foundation Conference (2019): 'Fossil Talk: Coleridge, Hutton, and the Theory of Earth' 

I also acted as the principle academic organiser for the Faculty's Graduate Conference (2019).