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Staff Profile

Professor Michael Rossington

Professor of Romantic Literature

Background

Roles in the School

Postgraduate Research Director

Director of PhD and MPhil Degree Programmes

Member of Executive Board and Research Committee

Teaching and supervision of undergraduate students, mainly in writing of the Romantic period.

Supervision of Postgraduate Research Students (MLitt, PhD).

Biography

BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature and MA, University of Oxford.

DPhil in English Literature, University of Oxford.

Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford.

Lecturer in Literature, The Open University.

Lecturer in English Literature, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Professor of Romantic Literature, Newcastle University.

Memberships

Friend of Newcastle University Library.

Friend of the Bodleian Library.

Friend of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association.

Friend of the Wordsworth Trust.

Expertise 

Writing of the Romantic period in English, especially poetry;

The writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley;

The writings of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley;

British writers and continental Europe in the Romantic period;

Textual editing, manuscript studies and bibliography.



Research

Current Project

A monograph on Percy Shelley.

Future Project

With Dr Ruth Abbott (Cambridge), an edition of The Poems of Wordsworth for the Longman Annotated English Poets series (Routledge).

Visiting Positions

Visiting Scholar, Trinity College, Cambridge (2016); Visiting Fellow, Exeter College, Oxford (2015); Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (2014); Visiting Fellow, St Catherine's College, Oxford (2012); Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford (2006); Visiting Scholar, St John's College, Oxford (1995).

External Funding

British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2018-20); Modern Humanities Research Association Research Associateship (2014-15); British Academy Overseas Conference Grant (2008); Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Leave Scheme award (2006-7); Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant (Co-Investigator) (2002-7); Arts and Humanities Research Board Research Leave Scheme award (1998-9): British Academy Small Research Grant (1998); British Academy Small Research Grant (1991).

General Editorship

General Editor of the Longman Annotated English Poets series (Routledge) with Professor Paul Hammond (Leeds) and Professor Cathy Shrank (Sheffield).

Peer Review College membership

Member of UKRI Talent Peer Review College

Advisory Boards and Editorial Committees

L'Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria; Lingue e Culture; The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford University Press); The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns (Oxford University Press); The Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope (Oxford University Press); The Oxford Works of Mary Shelley (Oxford University Press); The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe (Bloomsbury); The Shelley-Godwin Archive.

Public Engagement

#Shelley200 Roundtable: Epipsychidion (2021); The Late Mary Shelley (2021); BBC Radio 4 'In our Time': Frankenstein (2019); Shelley's Poetical Essay: The Bodleian Libraries' 12 millionth Book (2015); Frankenstein: The Secret Life of Books, BBC Four (2014).

Research degree supervision:

I supervise research into the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; poetry of the Romantic period including its manuscript and early printed forms, contexts, influences and reception; and textual editing. PhD students I've supervised or co-supervised include:

Refat Aljumily, who worked on a cluster analytic approach to the anonymous 1821 translation of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust, and is now researching the computation of linguistic features in literary texts and the classification of literary texts according to different criteria including writing style, poetic genres, registers and modes of poems.

Clare Almond, who worked on an interpretation of the dramatic in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writings through Walter Benjamin's theory of constellation, and is now researching stories about local witches for Ryedale Folk Museum.

Ayah Arabi Durkawi, who worked on nature and place in the poems of William Wordsworth and Walter Scott, and is now Associate Lecturer in the Department of Arabic and Persian at the University of St Andrews.

Christopher Goulding, who worked on the influence of James Lind on the scientific and philosophical thought of Percy Shelley, and is now a teacher of English Language and English Literature at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Katie Harland-Edminson, who worked on William Wordsworth's poetry and trauma theory, and is now Deputy Director, Development, in the Development and Alumni Office at Durham University.

Ben Hewitt, who worked on Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust and the writings of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and has since published a book and articles on Romantic poetry and drama.

Andrew Lacey, who worked on the philosophy of death in the poetry of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, and is now Senior Research Associate in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Soad Nigm, who worked on the idea of America in the works of Robert Southey, Joel Barlow and Walt Whitman, and is now Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at Tanta University.

Jonathan Quayle, who worked on utopia in Percy Shelley's poetry, and is now Lecturer in Romantic Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University.

Alice Robinson, who worked on Percy Shelley's debt to Ancient Roman Literature, and is currently researching an article about a manuscript at Keats-Shelley House, Rome with the support of a Newcastle University Career Development Post-Submission Bursary.

Helen Stark, who worked on masculinities and national identities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is now Research Impact Manager for the Arts & Humanities and Social & Historical Sciences Faculties at University College London.

Leanne Stokoe, who worked on political economy in Percy Shelley's prose, and is now Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University.

Yasuaki Sugiyama, who worked on Terry Eagleton and questions of realism in the English novel, now teaches English in Japan and is currently working on a book on English grammar and literature.

Rihana Suliman, who worked on codes of manliness in writings of the 1790s, and is now Lecturer in English Literature at Damascus University.

Valentina Varinelli, who worked on Percy Shelley and the Italian language, and is now Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures at the Catholic University of Brescia.

Rachel Woolley, who worked on the treatment of Italy in the writings of Mary Shelley, and is now Senior Tutor and UCAS Adviser in the Sixth Form at Rochester Independent College.

Xiao Yu, who worked on the representation of memory in the writings of William Wordsworth and George Eliot, and is now Career Development Coordinator at the Career Centre in the Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge.

Teaching

Undergraduate teaching:

Revolutions (SEL1005)

Revolutionary Britain, 1789-1832 (SEL2203)

Writing Liberty in the Romantic era (SEL3412)

Publications