Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor
Department of English
Department of Cinema & Media Studies
Committee on the History of Culture
Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities
Co-Director, Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture

Office: Regenstein S102 (Franke), Walker 507 (English)
Phone: (773) 702-8274 (Franke)
docj@uchicago.edu

My research and teaching interests include the Romantic movement; the study of lyric poetry; the history of the novel; relations between politics and literature, history and criticism; the Scottish Enlightenment; modern Irish literature and culture; the sentimental mode; cinema studies; and the history of humanities disciplines.

Courses

Graduate: Irish Modernity; The Sentimental; British Literary Culture, 1750-1850 (co-taught with Martha Feldman); Composing Humans, 1760-1840; Enlightened Typologies; Literature, History, and Science: 1750-1900 (co-taught with Alison Winter); Transformations of Style. Genre, Institution: 1740-1840

Undergraduate: From Sensibility To Romanticism; Anglo-Irish Literature; London: Urban Romanticism

Work in Progress

The Sentimental Mood: From Sterne to Capra (a book-length study of the sentimental as a stylistic and conceptual mode in literature and film); How to Do Criticism (commissioned for Blackwell); essays on Maria Edgeworth

Selected Publications

• The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. with Maureen McLane (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene in British Romanticism, 1780-1840, ed. with Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
• Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines, ed. with Arnold Davidson and H. N. Harootunian (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Editorial Work

General Editor, with Marilyn Butler, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, book series for Cambridge University Press, begun in 1990 (85 monograph volumes published through 2010).

General Editor, with David Bromwich and Lionel Gossman, Literature in History, book series for Princeton University Press, begun in 1991 (11 volumes published through 2009).

Education

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1978. Teaching at Chicago since 1976.