Professor Emma Mason
Professor
emma dot mason at warwick dot ac dot uk
emmajmason.wordpress.com
5.44 Faculty of Arts Building
University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7EQ
About
Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies. 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. My research and teaching are focused on Christianity and literature, mysticism, eighteenth and nineteenth-century studies, and Christian ecology.
Research
Christian eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry; Christian mysticism; kenosis; literature, ecology, religion. Recent publications include Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018). Future publications include volume III of the Complete Poems of William Barnes (Oxford University Press), William Barnes' Dialect Poems in the Dorset County Chronicle (Edinburgh University Press), The 1810s for the Cambridge University Press series, Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition, and Weird Faith in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Theologies at Work (Bloomsbury) with Mark Knight.
With Mark Knight, I edit the Bloomsbury monograph series New Directions in Religion and Literature. I serve on the editorial boards of Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press), The John Clare Society Journal, and the Romanticism pathway of Literature Compass (Blackwell). I'm a member of the Scholars of Religion and Literature Network, The Kilvert Society, and Arts Emergency.
Teaching and supervision
I teach undergraduate and postgraduate modules on religion, poetry, emotion, and philosophy; and welcome PhD students with interests in eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry and Christianity; as well as modern/contemporary Christian poetry.
Recent publications (full list here)
'Reading Christian Experience', Modern Language Quarterly, 83. 4 (2022), 521–537.
'Weakness and Wildness in Wordsworth's "The Brothers"', in Markus Poetzsch and Cassandra Falke, ed., Wild Romanticism (Routledge, 2021); also selected for inclusion in Routledge Historical Resources: Romanticism.
'Tree Being in Peter Larkin's "Skies in Flight of Tree"', Études Anglaises: revue de monde anglophone, 74. 1 (2021), 68–81.
Ed., Peter Larkin: Poetry, Phenomenology, Theology, special issue of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 12. 1 (2020).
'"How do you not be sad?" Sadness and Communication in BoJack Horseman', Post45, ed. Jack Belloli and Pamela Thurschwell (2020).
'Rossetti's Weak Apocalypse', The Ruskin Review, 14. 2 (2020), 86–99.
'Poetry', in Timothy Larsen, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (Oxford University Press, 2020).
'Praying kin: Christina Rossetti and the Unity of Things', in Jo Carruthers, Nour Dakkak, Rebecca Spence, ed., Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790-1930 (Palgrave, 2020).
'Considering the Lilies: Christina Rossetti's ecological Jesus', in Elizabeth Ludlow, ed., The Figure of Christ in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2020).
Appointments
I am on study leave from September 2023 - August 2025.