Dr Stacey McDowell

Associate 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, Oxford, and Bristol.

My research interests are in poetry; the relationship between literature and philosophy in the long eighteenth century; the history of the book and the history of reading. I have a wider interest in pedagogy and literary education, both its history and current practice, and have been involved in teaching literature in schools and prisons.

My book, Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2026), focuses on representations of people reading together in Romantic texts and asks what they reveal about both reading and togetherness. It shows what the peculiarly intimate kind of sharing involved in sharing a book has to say about the act of sharing more generally, especially in the context of eighteenth-century theories of sympathy and fellow feeling.

I am currently working on a new scholarly edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats for the Longman Annotated English Poets series.

My new project is on the rhetorical art of questioning, from Socrates to AI. It traces a long history of questioning in different contexts: Socratic dialogue, interrogation in early modern and neoclassical rhetoric, parliamentary questions and their first appearance in newspapers; psychoanalytic therapy; the formulation of AI prompts in an educational setting. I am interested in the way that literary texts draw on these contexts both in their descriptions of questioning and through the kinds of questions they direct at readers.

Selected Publications

Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

'Rhyme, Anticipation, and a Slip of the Ear: Ottava Rima in the 1810s', in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1810s, ed. Emma Mason (Cambridge University Press, 2026), 279-303.

‘Whispering Galleries, Echoes, and Literary Acoustics’, Literature and the Senses, ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Elizabeth Robertson (Oxford University Press, 2023), 144-61.

‘Walter Pater, Charles Lamb, and the Value of Reserve’, Walter Pater and the Development of English Studies, ed. Charles Martindale, Lene Østermark-Johansen and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 239-54.

‘Ann Yearsley and Habituated Indifference’, special issue on ‘Habit and Romanticism’, ed. Eliza Haughton-Shaw and Hannah Tran, The Cambridge Quarterly, 51:3 (2022), 258-76.

‘Wordsworth and Reading’s Promise’, Studies in Romanticism, 60:1 (2021), 57-78.

‘The Senses and Sensation’, in Keats in Context, edited by Michael O’Neill (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 188-197.

‘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.