Dr Jeremy Davies

Profile

I came to Leeds in 2011, after studying in Cambridge, Glasgow and London. I’ve held a wide range of roles in the School, including a long spell as convenor of the Environmental Humanities research group.

Research interests

I have two main sets of interests: environmental approaches to British Romantic writing, and theories of the 'Anthropocene.'

Most of my work is on the literary and cultural history of environmental change in the British Romantic period, a.k.a. the ‘shorter Industrial Revolution.’ It includes an edited special issue of Studies in Romanticism (2022) called An Inventive Age: Writing of the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1830, and a book in progress called ‘The Altered Landscape: Literature, Environment and Industry in Britain, 1799–1825.’ The book links literature and philosophy to experiences of agricultural reform, land reclamation, estate management, horticulture and industrial planning. I’m writing about a mixture of canonical writers (the Wordsworths, PB Shelley) and some less well known ones. If you’re currently doing research on William Madocks, William Roscoe or Charles Waterton, I’d be very pleased to hear from you. The project has been supported by an AHRC early career fellowship.

In 2016 I published The Birth of the Anthropocene (University of California Press), one of the first books on that proposed new geological epoch. In it, I argue that the thought of the Anthropocene is a valuable one for green politics and environmental movements because it opens a window to geological time, offering a way to locate the modern environmental catastrophe in the deep context of planetary history.

I'm continuing to write about the Anthropocene in some essays on geology, time, and lyric (plus a more or less defunct blog, Made Ground).

My first book was Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature (Routledge, 2014). It explores the history of physical pain in the decades before the development of surgical anaesthesia in 1846. The strangeness of the experience of pain - it's at once intimate and alien, both self-evident and inscrutable - made it intellectually productive for a number of Romantic-period writers, among them Jeremy Bentham, the Marquis de Sade, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and PB Shelley.  The book tries to show how pain could prompt new ways of thinking about ethics and identity. It was shortlisted for the University English prize for the year's best book in English studies by an early career scholar, and for the BARS First Book Prize.

I’ve supervised PhDs on Mont Blanc in Romantic culture; on sleep and sleeplessness in Romantic poetry and phenomenology; and on Transcendentalism and ornithology. If you're thinking about doctoral study on a (broadly) Romantic-period topic, please feel free to get in touch.

Student education

My main teaching interests are in eighteenth-century, Romantic-period and environmental literature at all levels, and in foundational teaching for students recently arrived at university.

Research groups and institutes

• Environmental Humanities Research Group