Dr. Ewan Jones
Biography
I'm Associate Professor in the Nineteenth Century at the Faculty of English, and a fellow and Director of Studies for Part II at Downing. I completed my BA, MPhil and PhD at King's College, Cambridge, and was previously Thole Research Fellow at Trinity Hall. I teach for Part I, Papers I (Practical Criticism and Critical Practice), 6 (English Literature and its Contexts 1660-1870) and 7a (English Literature and its Contexts 1830-1945); and for Part II, Papers 9 (Love, Gender and Sexuality, 1740-1824), 10 (1847–1872), 15 (The Ethical Imagination), 16 (The History and Theory of Literary Criticism) and 17 (Lyric). I supervise dissertations in the above areas.
My research concentrates upon rhythm in anglophone poetry. I'm interested in how we reconcile the often forbiddingly technical panoply of prosodic terms (iambs, dactyls, spondees and the rest) to actually ocurring intuitive events in the body. This longstanding concern has recently led me to develop an interest in the psychology and cognitive science of attention. How do poems focus and distract our modes of attending? How might we probe such questions not from the vantage of the disembodied 'ideal reader', but in concrete pedagogical settings?
I've published two books that treat such questions, with a further collection of essays (co-edited with Marion Thain) forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. I've also published widely on poetics, intellectual history and computational approaches to historical datasets, in venues that include Critical Inquiry, Representations, ELH. I have also collaborated with Phyllis Weliver on a project to digitise manuscripts relating to Alfred Lord Tennyson.
I've been a Fulbright Scholar, residential fellow at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study, Leverhulme research fellow, and visiting fellow at Ludwig Maximilian Universität, Pomona College, and Keio University.
Research Interests
Verse form; aesthetics; cognitive science; computational approaches to literature.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I've supervised doctoral work on themes that include: 'radical conservatism' in Victorian poetry; queer theory and historical poetics; the reception of Wagner in Anglophone poetry; morphogenetic conceptions of form; metre and exact measurement. I welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students whose work intersects with any of my research interests.
Connect with Ewan
Publications
Books
Jones, E., The Turn of Rhythm: How Victorian Poetry Shaped a Concept (University of Virginia Press, 2023).
Jones, E., Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge University Press, 2014; paperback 2017).
Jones, E., and Thain M., eds., Close Reading as Attentional Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Articles
Jones, E., 'Unfree Verse and the Liberal Subject', forthcoming in Literary Conservatism, ed. Alex Murray (Cambridge University Press, 2027).
Jones, E., 'The Attentive Eye / The Attentive Ear: Learning (and Unlearning) Focus in the Enlightenment', forthcoming in The Attentive Ear, ed. Carmel Raz (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, 2026).
Jones, E., 'Attention-Stress: Cognitive Rhythm in the Prosody Archive', forthcoming in Victorian Poetry ('Princeton Prosody Archive' special issue, ed. Meredith Martin).
Jones, E., ‘Metre and Rhythm’, in Handbook of Poetic Forms, ed. Jessica Bundschu and Irmtraud Huber (De Gruyter, 2025).
Jones E., and Thain M., 'Introduction: Close Reading as Attentional Practice', in Close Reading as Attentional Practice, ed. Ewan Jones and Marion Thain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Jones, E., 'Reading in a Darkened Room: I. A. Richards and the Uses of Distraction ', in Close Reading as Attentional Practice, ed. Ewan Jones and Marion Thain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Jones, E., and Roxburgh, N., 'The Age of Irritability', Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas, ed. Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 184–205.
Jones, E., 'Computing Knowledge in Historical Corpora', Histoires de mots: Saisir le passé grâce aux données textuelles, ed. Léo Dumont, Octave Julien and Stéphane Lamassé (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2023), 107–25.
Jones, E., 'Poetic Vigils, Rhythmical Vigilance', in Zeiten der Wachsamkeit, ed. Arendt Brendecke and Susanne Reichlin (Boston, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), 131–156.
Jones, E., ‘Impractical Criticism’, English: Journal of the English Association, 71.275 (December 2022), 304–08.
Jones, E, 'Verse Arabesque', Victorian Poetry ('Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination: New Conversations' special issue, ed. Heather Bozant Witcher and Jill Ehnen), 60.4 (Winter 2022), 465–491.
Jones, E., 'Coleridge's Metres', in The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Tim Fulford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 96–110.
Jones, E., 'Tennyson's Phantom Ballads', Victorian Poetry, 59.2 (Summer 2021), 201–221.
Jones, E., 'What is a Computational Emotion?', Studia Neophilologia ('Bodies and Architectures as Spatial Sensing Systems' special issue, ed. N. Katherine Hayles and Sophia Ahlberg), 93.2 (October 2021), 173–189.
Jones, E., 'Pretty Vacant: Shelley's Metrical Stops', The Wordsworth Circle, 52.1 (Winter 2021), 72–93 ('Metrical Movements' special issue, ed. Charles Mahoney).
Jones, E., 'How to Learn, Together, Alone', Critical Inquiry, 47.S2 (Winter 2021), 123–126.
Jones, E., Recchia, G., Nulty, P., Regan, J., & de Bolla, P., 'The Idea of Liberty 1600-1800: A Distributional Concept Analysis', Journal of the History of Ideas, 83.3 (July 2020), 381-406.
Jones, E. and Weliver, P., 'The Tennysons' Princess, and the Performance of Childhood', in The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 462–475.
Healey R, Jones, E., Recchia, G., Nulty, P., Regan, J., ., & de Bolla, P., ‘The Uses of Genre: Is there an ‘Adam Smith Question?’, Representations 149 (Winter 2020), 73–102.
Jones, E. and Nulty, P, 'Quantitative Measures of Lexical Complexity in Modern Prose Fiction', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34.4 (December 2019), 914–937.
de Bolla, P., Jones, E., Nulty, P., Recchia, G. and Regan, J., 'The Conceptual Foundations of the Modern Idea of Government in the British Eighteenth Century: A Distributional Concept Analysis'. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 7.1 (September 2019), 619–652.
Jones, E., Recchia, G., Nulty, P., Regan, J., & de Bolla, P., 'Distributional Concept Analysis: A Computational Model for parsing Conceptual Forms', Contributions to the History of Concepts, 14.1 (Summer 2019), 66–92.
Jones, E., 'Rhythm and Affect in "Christabel"', Critical Rhythm, ed. Jonathan Culler and Ben Glaser (Fordham UP, 2019), 274–295.
Jones, E., ‘Thermodynamic Rhythm: The Poetics of Waste’, Representations, 144 (Fall 2018), 60–88.
Jones, E., 'The Sonic Organization of "Kubla Khan"', Studies in Romanticism, 57.2 (Summer 2018), 243–264.
Jones, E., Carlson J. & Ruderman, D., 'Romanticizing Historical Poetics' in Essays in Romanticism, 25.1 (2018), 1–9 ('Romanticizing Historical Poetics' special issue, ed. Julia S. Carlson, Ewan Jones and David B. Ruderman').
Jones, E., 'Wordsworth's Strenuous Indolence', in Essays in Romanticism, 25.1 (2018), 101–121 ('Romanticizing Historical Poetics' special issue, ed. Julia S. Carlson, Ewan Jones and David B. Ruderman').
Recchia, G., Jones, E., Nulty, P., Regan, J., & de Bolla, P., 'Tracing shifting conceptual vocabularies through time' in Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: EKAW 2016 Satellite Events, EKM and Drift-an-LOD, Bologna, Italy, November 19–23, 2016, Revised Selected Papers, ed. P. Ciancarini, P. et al., 19–28.
Jones, E., 'Coventry Patmore's Corpus', ELH 83.3 (Fall 2016), 839–872.
Jones, E., '"Let the Rank Tongue Blossom": Browning's Stuttering', Victorian Poetry, 53.2 (Summer 2015), 103–132.
Jones, E., 'Split Lines in Shakespeare and Coleridge', Essays in Criticism, 65.4 (October 2015), 421–446.
Jones, E., 'John "Walking" Stewart, and the Ethics of Motion', Romanticism, 21.2 (July 2015), 119–131.
Jones, E., 'Lyric Explanation: Tennyson's Princesses', Thinking Verse, 4.1 (November 2014), 50–78.
Jones, E., '"Earth Worm Wit Lies Underground": the Compositional Genesis of Coleridge's "Limbo" Constellation', Modern Philology, 110.4 (May 2013), 513–535.
Jones, E., '"Less Gross than Bodily": Materiality in the Conversation Poem Sequence', Review of English Studies, 64.264 (April 2013), 267–88.
Jones, E., 'Coleridge, Hyman Hurwitz and Hebrew Poetics', Coleridge Bulletin, Winter 2012, 59–68.
Reviews
Jones, E. ‘Vincent Barletta, Rhythm: Form and Dispossession, Ben Glaser, Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics’, Poetics Today, 44.3 (September 2023), 487-494.
Jones, E., 'Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History', Review of English Studies, 70.294 (April 2019), 396–98.
Jones, E., 'Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 71.1 (June 2016), 132–36.
Jones, E., 'Chris Murray, Tragic Coleridge', Coleridge Bulletin, Winter 2015, 125–29.
Jones, E., 'Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Michael O'Neil and Charles Mahoney', Coleridge Bulletin, Summer 2014, 77–83.
Jones, E., 'Tim Milnes, The Truth About Romanticism', Coleridge Bulletin, Summer 2012, 118–122.
Jones, E., 'Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder', Coleridge Bulletin, Summer 2010, 106–111.
Jones, E., 'Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry', Coleridge Bulletin, Winter 2009, 87–91.