Assistant Professor

Email: Stacey dot McDowell at warwick dot ac dot uk

5.47 Faculty of Arts Building
University Road
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

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About

I teach eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Before joining the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick, I held posts at Cambridge and Bristol.

My research focuses on poetry, literature and philosophy, reading studies, and sexuality and gender.

My book, Close Reading: Intimacy and Reticence in Romantic Literature, looks at the representation of shared and intimate reading practices in Romantic-period texts. I draw upon the seemingly conflicting senses of the word ‘close’ (near and intimate versus guarded and withdrawn) to think about the quality of closeness that is being sought after or flinched away from in acts of shared reading. By focusing on scenes of shared reading that feature within Romantic texts, I suggest how literary form is able to express some of the less graspable, less explicitly sayable aspects of intimacy and sharing.

I have a wider interest in pedagogy, mentorship and literary education - both historically and in the present. I have also been involved in teaching literature in schools and prisons.

Selected Publications

‘Wordsworth and Reading's Promise’, Studies in Romanticism, forthcoming Spring 2021

'Sounding Form', in Literature and the Senses: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, edited by Annette Kern-Stähler and Elizabeth Robertson (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

'Ottava Rima's Transitional Moods', in The 1810s, edited by Emma Mason, part of the multi-volume series, 'Re-reading the Nineteenth Century', General Editors, Juliet John et al (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

‘The Value of Reserve’, in Walter Pater and the Development of English Studies, edited by Charles Martindale, Lene Østermark-Johansen, and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

‘The Senses and Sensation’, in Keats in Context, edited by Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

‘Shiftiness in Keats’s “Ode on Indolence”’, Romanticism 23:1 (2017), 27-37

‘Rhyming and Undeciding in Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson’, Romanticism 23:2 (2017), 179-190

‘Reading Together’, Essays in Criticism 64 (2014), 351-372