Assistant Professor
Department of English

Office: Rosenwald 415B
campbellt@uchicago.edu

My current research examines how a rise of historical self-consciousness in British fiction of the long eighteenth century alongside the conditions of modern commerce are provoking influential, new modes of historical engagement throughout British culture at this moment. I am particularly interested in the connections between the eighteenth-century origins (and the Romantic-era consolidation) of the genre of the historical novel and the new temporalities shaped by an emerging consumer culture—especially the serial, visual culture of fashion.

My thinking about the constraints but also the possibilities of the commerce-inflected historiographies of the long eighteenth century extends from fashion plates, costume history, portraiture, and the philosophy of "taste" to the Romantic fictional practices of Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin, Walter Scott, and their contemporaries.

Graduate:  Romantic Fiction and the Historical Novel; Commercial Affects of the Eighteenth Century.

Undergraduate:  Fashion and Literature; Genres of History in the Long Eighteenth Century; Media Aesthetics: Image; Media Aesthetics: Sound.

"'The Business of War': William Godwin, Enmity, and Historical Representation," ELH 76.2 (2009): 343-369.

Ph.D., Indiana University, 2008.  Teaching at Chicago since 2008.