Professor Emma Mason
About
Research and teaching: poetry, Christianity and literature, philosophy and literature, Catholic theology and literature, Catholic ecology and literature, the long nineteenth-century.
BA English Literature; MA Critical and Cultural Theory (University of Cardiff-Wales); PhD English and Comparative Literary Studies (University of Warwick and University of Madison-Wisconsin); British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (Corpus Christi, Oxford). I served as Head of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick from 2018-2023; and have convened the Comparative Religions and Literatures group since 2012.
Research
I'm currently writing a study of Catholic mysticism in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. With Linden Bicket, Rebekah Lamb, Bonnie Lander Johnson, and Julia Meszaros, I'm an editor of the in-progress Oxford Handbook of Modern Catholic Women's Writing; and I edit the Bloomsbury monograph series New Directions in Religion and Literature with Mark Knight.
My books include William Barnes, Dialect Poems in the Dorset County Chronicle, with T. L. Burton (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018), Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2015), Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2012), and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (Cambridge University Press, 2010). A full list of my publications is here.
Teaching and supervision
I teach undergraduate and postgraduate modules on poetry, theology, and philosophy.
Recent & forthcoming publications
'The Quiet Life', The Oxford Handbook of William Cowper, ed. Jessica Fay and Andrew Hodgson (Oxford University Press, 2027).
Nineteenth Century Literature in Transition: The 1810s, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
William Barnes, Dialect Poems in the Dorset County Chronicle, with T. L. Burton (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).
'Christian Experience', Dorothy Wordsworth in Context, ed. Jessica Fay (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
'Second and silent springs: Creation and Ecology in Newman's Novels', John Henry Newman the Educator: Formation, Philosophy, Legacy, ed. Fr. Juan R. Vélez (Gracewing, 2025).
'Religion', The Cambridge Companion to John Clare, ed. Sarah Houghton-Walker (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 183-195.
'Religion, language, nation: William Barnes' Christianity', Victorian Studies, 66. 2 (Winter, 2024), pp. 240–254.
'Reading Christian Experience', Modern Language Quarterly, 83. 4 (2022), 521–537.
Contact details
Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies Faculty of Arts Building, Rm 544; emma.mason@warwick.ac.uk
I am on study leave until Easter 2026.
