Carmen Faye Mathes
poetry and poetics; British Romanticism; transatlantic and global Romanticism; history of feeling; history of medicine; affect theory and theories of the emotions; aesthetic philosophy; literary theory and criticism
I am a British Romanticist with expertise in poetry and poetics, affect theory and the history of the emotions, aesthetic philosophy, and literary theory and criticism. My teaching and research focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, mostly poetry, in transatlantic and global contexts. Related interests include the history of medicine, contemporary book review culture and contemporary Canadian poetry. I’m the author of Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation (Stanford UP, 2022), a book about aesthetic disappointment and the ethical work of poetry. A question central to my work is how to square that subjects are “subject to” forces and systems beyond their control, and even beyond their awareness, with the desire for self-determination, for volition and choice. How ought we to live towards a better future when such forces are at play?
My current book project, Poetry’s Postures of Labour and Longing, takes up such questions in Romantic appeals for social justice by investigating the particular “postures” that poets enact in order to call for change. I'm also in the early stages of a project on the history of seizure disorders in the long eighteenth century.
I’ve published scholarly articles in Critical Inquiry (forthcoming), Representations, Studies in Romanticism and European Romantic Review. I am proud to have been involved in the Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Online project, which has created a fully searchable, publicly accessible digital edition with functionality comparable to other modern scholarly dictionaries. I’m the book reviews editor at Prose Studies and a she/her person who wears a lot of hats.
Ph.D., UBC
M.A., University of Toronto
B.A., University of Calgary
Articles and Chapters
“Apostrophe’s Occasions: Two Postures of Abolitionist Address.” Critical Inquiry (accepted and forthcoming, Spring, 2025)
“Lucretius Taken Lightly: Women’s Educations and the Radical Materialist Joke.” Representations 159 (Summer 2022): 43-57.
“Affect Theory.” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, edited by Emilia Quinn and Ranjan Ghosh, vol 30 of The English Association’s Year in Review Series (Oxford University Press, 2022): 1-17.
“Coleridge Tripping: The Biographia Literaria and Proprioceptive Self-Possession.” Studies in Romanticism 59 (Summer 2020): 185-208.
“Reading and the Sociality of Disappointing Affects in Jane Austen” in Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text. Edited by Stephen Ahern (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019): 85-104.
“‘that strong excepted soul’: Nineteenth-Century Women Read Keats” in Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives. Edited by Brian Rejack and Michael Theune, (Liverpool UP, 2019): 60-75.
“Listening Not Listening: William Wordsworth and the Radical Materiality of Sound.” European Romantic Review 28.3 (2017): 315-324.
“‘Let us not therefore go hurrying about’: Towards an Aesthetics of Passivity in Keats’s Poetics.” European Romantic Review 25.3 (2014): 309-318
Reviews and Public Scholarship
I’m passionate about the value of book reviews for engaging in and advancing critical conversations in and beyond academia. I’ve written scholarly reviews about books that explore capitalism’s investment in the rhetoric of “not enough”; on insensibility and unfeeling; on Thinking Through Poetry; and on the state of affect theory now-ish (in 2021), among others. I’ve written reviews of contemporary Canadian poetry for the Capilano Review, the Toronto Review of Books and EVENT Magazine. Doing so has taught me so much, and I often find that what I’ve learned from reviewing creative works informs my scholarship. As Book Reviews Editor at Prose Studies, I endeavour to bring reviewers together with books that will similarly inspire them, and to support early career scholars by paying careful editorial attention to their reviews. Are you interested in reviewing a book about nonfiction prose for Prose Studies? Please reach out!
I’m invested too in questions around pedagogy and the limits and potentials of what we call “the classroom.” Here’s an essay about teaching transatlantic Romanticism at a distance, and another, co-written piece (forthcoming) that reflects on anti-racist course design in a graduate seminar on labour and longing in the context of British Romanticism’s global interests.
Finally, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Online is a place you can find out how words were used in and before 1773, like “thoughtsick,” which is perhaps a feeling you’ve experienced. For Public Books, I wrote a reflection about finding the sources of Johnson’s illustrative quotations called “Losing Discoveries – So Others Can Find Them.”
- SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2023
- Durham Residential Research Library - Barker Fellowship, 2023
- NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant, 2019
As co-Principal Investigator, with Beth Rapp Young, Principal Investigator; Jack Lynch, co-Principal Investigator; and Amy Giroux, co-Principal Investigator - University of Central Florida Vice President for Research Advancement of Early Career Researchers Grant, 2017
I would welcome expressions of interest from graduate students interested in any aspect of British Romanticism; the history of slavery and empire; history of medicine; British abolitionism; aesthetic philosophy; historical and contemporary theories of the affections, feelings and emotions; and the poetics and politics of revolution and reform.
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory
University of Central Florida, Orlando, traditional Seminole, Mascogo and Miccosukee territory
University of Regina, Treaty 4 territory, Saskatchewan