I received my Ph.D. from Boston University. I specialize in British and Irish Romantic poetry and prose (i.e. writing from the period 1780-1830) and in the history and theory of feeling, mobility, media/ mediation, and literary form. My first book, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830, on genre and the mediation of emergent theories of nation-ness, was published in the Studies in Romanticism series of Cambridge University Press in 2000. My most recent series of articles, in Studies in Romanticism, Poetics Today, European Romantic Review, and Romantic Circles Praxis, explores intersections between mobility, medical history, and figuration in Wordsworth, Owenson, and Mary Shelley. My current book project Romantic Transport, 1790-1830 intervenes in three fields of inquiry within Romantic studies: migration and mobility studies (especially the relations between poetics and the circulation of people, plants, paper, diseases, and feelings by means of inland navigation and transatlantic shipping), medical history and the history of sensation (especially the contemporary parallels between the workings of the human nervous system and the workings of transportation networks and technologies) and the history of form and figuration (especially the affective character of metaphorization and its relation to the production of racial and other others in the poetics of British and Irish Romanticism.) The major writers discussed are Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Austen, De Quincey, and Owenson.

Areas of Research Interest:

Book History & Textual Studies

Media Studies

Poetry and Poetics

Romanticism

Science & Technology Studies

Selected Publications:

“Jane Austen on Paper.” European Romantic Review. Forthcoming.

“Sydney Owenson’s Strange Phenomenality.” In Yoon Sun Lee, ed, The Prose of Romanticism, Romantic Circles Praxis. 5774 words ms. February 2017. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/prose

“Secret History in the Romantic Period.” In Rebecca Bullard and Rachel K. Carnell, eds., The Secret History in Literature, 1660-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 188-201.

“How Wordsworth tells: Numeration, Valuation, and Dwelling in ‘We Are Seven.’” In Paul Youngquist, Jeffrey Cox, and Jill Heydt-Stevenson, eds. Secure Sites: Empire and the Emergence of Security. ELN 54.1 (2016): 39-52.

“Sydney Owenson’s Tropics.” European Romantic Review 26, 3 (2015): 281-288.

“Transporting Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Mobile Figures.” European Romantic Review 25 (2014): 247-265.

“Frankenstein’s Transport: Modernity, Mobility, and the Science of Feeling.” In Evan Gottlieb, ed., Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014. 127-148.

“On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form.” Poetics Today 32 (2011): 289-320.

“Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling.” Studies in Romanticism 49 (2010): 229-260.

“Nation, Book, Medium: New Technologies and their Genres.” In Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein, eds. Genre Theory and Internet. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009. 193-219.

http://mirandaburgess.com/BuTo 512I teach courses on Romanticism that emphasize its incipiently global character and its mobile, maritime, riparian, and island networks and courses that take a workshop approach to media history (with students exploring a variety of early print media as practitioners as well as readers, scholars, and critics.) At the graduate level, I have been interested most recently in exploring the history of sensation in philosophy and poetics with seminar participants.