I specialize in British and Irish Romantic-period writing (i.e. writing from the period 1780-1840) 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, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000 and considered the way genre and genre change mediated emergent theories of social cohesion and, ultimately-nation-ness. My most recent series of articles investigates intersections of mobility, mediation, and figuration in Wordsworth, Owenson, and Mary Shelley. A book in progress, Romantic Transport, 1790-1830, considers the figuration of being with others in the contexts of global mobility and coloniality. My next projects are on the category of “raw materials” in imperial media ecologies, 1780-1870; and on the uses of Romantic poetry and poetics in settler-colonial placemaking in the Pacific Northwest. I am a recipient of the UBC Killam Research Prize (2001) and the UBC Killam Teaching Prize (2022), and, with Thora Brylowe of the University of Colorado at Boulder, I won the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism’s Pedagogy Prize in 2017 for a media history course co-designed and co-taught between the U of Colorado and UBC.

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.