Head of Department

emma dot mason at warwick dot ac dot uk

H5.03 Humanities Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

About

I am currently Head of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and teach on our BA and MA programs. Before becoming HoD, I convened the Philosophy and Literature BA with Eileen John in Philosophy. After studying at the University of Cardiff-Wales (BA English Literature; MA Critical and Cultural Theory), I completed my PhD at the University of Warwick and University of Madison-Wisconsin, and went on to a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Corpus Christi, Oxford. I have held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and the Huntington Library, California, and am the founder and director of the research groups CoRAL (Comparative Religions and Literatures) and PAW (Poetry at Warwick).

I work on late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature and religion, with a focus on poetry, and am broadly interested in religion and ecology, affect theory, and philosophy and literature. My book Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith was published in 2018 with Oxford University Press; and I'm currently writing Weird Faith in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Theologies at Work with Mark Knight, with whom I edit the Bloomsbury monograph series New Directions in Religion and Literature.

With Neil Badmington, I am editor of the Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press); and 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 also a member of the Arts Emergency network.

Recent publications (full list here)

Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018).

‘"Whales and all that move in the waters": Christina Rossetti’s ecology of grace’, in Wendy Parkins, ed., Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2017).

'Entanglement in fir: thinking matter in Peter Larkin’s “praying // firs \\ attenuate”, in Religions, 9. 1 (2017).

'Critical Vulnerability and the Weakness of Poetry', Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London, May 8, 2017.

Review essay, '"Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage": Art and the Sacred in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain', Marginalia: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel, January 28, 2017

‘Devotional Poetry,’ in Jack Lynch, ed., The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry 1660-1800 (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 563-578.

‘"All green things": Christina Rossetti's Franciscan ecology’, Religioni e letteratura: nuove intersezioni, Studium, 4 (2016), 530-557.

‘Thinking with plants: ecological logos and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Coleridge Bulletin, 47 (Summer 2016), 73-85.