Dr Chris Townsend

Dr Chris Townsend

Associate Lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2682
Email
ct97@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

I received my B.A. from the University of Exeter, and my M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where I also taught for four years. I took up the role of Research Fellow in the School of English in September 2023, and began a stint as Associate Lecturer in 2025, but I was previously a visiting Fleeman Fellow in St Andrews in 2018.

Research areas

I'm an Associate Lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature, with interests that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I'm currently working on a book on abolitionist poetry, with particular focus on how the drive to write political verse in the abolitionist period contributed to the poetic formal diversity we associate with Romanticism.

Current work includes essays on William Cowper's blank verse, the perceived relation of rhyme to commercial cultiure in the eighteenth century, and the uses of the 'unheroic' form of the anapaestic tetrameter couplet in antislavery poetry. I'm increasingly interested in Cowper, and will be contributing an essay (on 'Abolitionist Writings') to the Oxford Handbook to William Cowper.

I've published broadly on poetic form and formal history, including essays on rhyme and rhythm in figures like Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Mary Robinson, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson. I've published dedicated essays on writers as far back as Pope, and as close to the present as Elif Batuman.

Publications

Books

—Philosophical Connections: Akenside, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
—George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Selected publications

 

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