On Leave: Academic Year 2009-2010
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

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

My research and teaching interests are centered in the Romantic Movement in England and include 18th- and 19th-Century poetry; the rise of historicism, the concept of the "period," the "case," and the historical novel; relations between politics and literature, history and criticism; romantic fiction; the Scottish Enlightenment; Scottish and Irish literatures and cultures; the long history of sentiment; and film. I also serve as Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

The Sympathetic Eye: A Brief History of Sentiment  [This project aims to set the work of Frank Capra—and of "golden age" Hollywood more generally—in much longer perspectives of cultural and intellectual history than one finds in the existing scholarship: e.g., perspectives that open out to the long-evolving conventions of the sentimental novel, the Romantic-period conception of sympathy and spectatorship in the literary public sphere, and, ultimately, the emergence of what I call "sentimental probability" in the commercial theory of Adam Smith.]

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).

General Editor, with Marilyn Butler, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, book series for Cambridge University Press, begun in 1990 (67 monograph volumes published through 2006).

General Editor, with David Bromwich and Lionel Gossman, Literature in History, book series for Princeton University Press, begun in 1991 (10 volumes published through 2006).

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