Research and Teaching Interests
I work in the area of British, German, and European Romanticism and nineteenth-century culture, from perspectives that emphasize performativity and performance. My books Creating States (1994) and The Romantic Performative (2000) approach literary texts with a focus on verbal performativity, speech acts, and philosophies of language. In recent years, I have been studying the influence of improvisational poetry across Europe during the Romantic period. My book Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 reveals the popularity of improvising performers and shows how poetic improvisation interacts with Romantic ideas about genius, spontaneity, orality, gender, and national identity. My current research concerns experimental uses of textual, visual, and performative media during the 1820s and investigates the era's preoccupation with personal identity, celebrity, anonymity, and pseudonymity. In the course of this research I am working with literary magazines, innovative forms of theatre, and popular fiction, especially the work of the Scottish writer John Galt. Other areas covered in my research and teaching are English and German Romantic poetry (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Hemans, Landon, Hölderlin) and fiction (Scott, Godwin, Kleist, Staël). I am a Founding Member and Executive Committee member of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), Founding Director of the University of Western Ontario's graduate program in Comparative Literature (MA and PhD) and the University of Zurich's PhD program in English and American Literary Studies, Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, a member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association, and a Trustee of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation.
Current Projects
"Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850." This project involves a cultural history of improvisation as a mode of performance practised mainly by Italian poets (improvvisatori and improvvisatrici) during the Romantic era. My research focuses on the reception and influence of these performances throughout European literature and culture. I examine representations of improvisers in travel literature, journals, letters, reviews, essays, literary magazines, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works in order to show how the pan-European discourse about improvisation helps to form the concept of "Romantic genius" and to shape ideas about national and personal identity. In addition to a monograph and scholarly articles, projected outcomes include a web-accessible database of documents concerning poetic improvisers and improvisational performances during the period 1750-1850.
"Mediality, Improvisation, and Cultural Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century Information Age." This research project aims to open up a new perspective on literary-cultural production in western Europe during the post-Waterloo period, an era often marginalized by literary history and theory. The rapidly evolving media practices of the 1820s and 1830s will be used to challenge long-standing assumptions about the domestic, derivative, and conservate nature of English and German literature during this era. By emphasizing new media such as literary-cultural magazines and innovative performance genres, I seek to redefine and re-interpret 1820-1840 as an "age of information" as well as an "age-in-formation." Such a redefinition offers new insights into the self-representations and representations of other cultures produced by an era that was preoccupied with theatricality, improvisation, and rapid changes in the conditions of communication. Cutting across traditional period concepts and interpretative paradigms, an exploration of the complex network of relationships among internationally circulating performance genres and printed texts also generates a new awareness of the changing relationships between producers and consumers of culture.
"Discursive Constructions of Identity in European Romanticism." I am co-Principal Investigator, together with Prof. Christoph Bode, for this team project involving faculty, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows from the University of Zurich, the University of Western Ontario, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. The overall objective is to push beyond the current state of scholarship on the problematics of identity in Western European literature and culture during the transitional period 1750-1850, a period that saw crucial changes in the evolution of psychological and political notions of subjectivity, the rise of nationhood and national identity, and the emergence of the modern categories of "self," "community," and "other." Through a cluster of interrelated studies of identity-formation in literary and philosophical texts, periodical literature, correspondence, and travel accounts, the research group seeks to analyse the mechanisms that govern identification "with" and identification "as" an individual or a group, and to elucidate the role of language and discourse in these processes.
