Dr Jeremy Davies

Profile

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

Research interests

I work on British Romantic literature and on the history of ecological change, especially in connection with ideas of the ‘Anthropocene.’

I’m finishing a book called ‘The Altered Landscape: Literature and Environmental Change in Britain, 1799–1825.’ The book links literature and philosophy to experiences of agricultural reform, land reclamation, estate management, horticulture and industrial planning. It includes 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.

I’m the editor of a special issue of Studies in Romanticism, An Inventive Age: Writing of the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1830, and of a website, Writing the Industrial Revolution.

My next book will be an anthology of the literature of the Industrial Revolution from 1750 to 1860, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

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, politics, and lyric. The most recent one is here.

My first book was Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature (Routledge, 2014). The strangeness of the experience of physical pain - it's at once intimate and alien, both self-evident and inscrutable - made it intellectually productive for Romantic-period writers. The book 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.

• Experiments in Land and Society, 1793-1833
• Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Industry and Literature, 1770-1830

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