Alexis Chema | Department of English Language and Literature

Director of Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Professor

Walker 515

Ph.D., Yale, 2016

Teaching at UChicago since 2015

Biography

I specialize in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture, with particular interest in poetry, visual art, and the civic functions they have been engaged to serve.

My new book, Adorned: The Romantic Poetics of Ornament (Stanford, August 2026), makes the case that ornament is an essential but neglected poetic concept. It looks to Romantic-era writing about linguistic ornament as, most immediately, a guide to reading the poetry of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries; and, more broadly, as a locus for reconsidering the critical expectations that color the evaluation and enjoyment of poetry today.

I am developing a second book, The Miscellanists: On Genre and its Assemblers. Much of the poetry I consider in Adorned circulated in miscellaneous bibliographic formats like instructional texts, periodicals, anthologies, commonplace books, albums, and notebooks; The Miscellanists aims to provide sustained consideration of these formats and their makers—some well-known (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt) and others who were obscure and anonymous.

My courses are regularly cross-listed with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and in addition to teaching about literature, I have enjoyed designing courses that relate constructions of gender to aspects of everyday life, like childhood, food practices, walking, emotion, illness, and, of course, reading and writing.

Selected Publication

Adorned: The Romantic Poetics of Ornament. Stanford University Press, 2026.
“Toward a Poetics of Synonymy: Reading Eighteenth-Century Polite Verse with Mary Wollstonecraft and Hester Piozzi.” Forthcoming from ELH (Fall 2026).
“The Domestic Economy of a Poem Book.” Gender, Literary Networks and Media Cultures in the Eighteenth Century, Ed. Leith Davis, Michelle Levy, and Diana Solomon. Forthcoming from Bucknell University Press (December 2026).
The Manuscript Book in the Long Eighteenth Century. Special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life. Co-editor, with Betty Schellenberg. (48.1) January 2024.
“‘Where Are Your Books?’: Wordsworth’s Commonplaces.” Eighteenth-Century Life 48.1 (2024): 217-236.
“Diction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Poem, ed. Sean Pryor. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
“Punning in Pure English.” Forum on poetics, “Poetic Language & the Outside.” Tupelo Quarterly (March 2020).
“‘A Tongue in Every Star’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Poetics of Influence.” Essays in Romanticism 23.2 (2016): 193-210.

Teaching

2026-2027 Courses:
• Byron, Shelley, & Keats
• Greece & Rome: Texts, Traditions, Transformations

2025-2026 Courses:
• Frankenstein
• 9 Walks: Romantic London on Foot

Graduate:
•    The Pleasure of Hating: Satire Now and Then
•    Bad Readers
•    The Print Revolution & New Readers: Women, Workers, Children

Undergraduate:
•    Poetry in the Land of Childhood
•    Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley
•    Romantic Poetry and the World
•    Experiments in Epic Poetry
•    Romantic Endangerment
•    Gender & the Circulation of Texts

Subject Area: 18th Century British/Romanticism, 19th Century, Poetry and Poetics, Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, British Literature, Critical Theory and Objects of Study

Recent Courses

ENGL 20072 Frankenstein

Crosslistings

GNSE 20072

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is arguably the most famous horror story ever written. Frankenstein is also a mythopoetic tour de force whose searching moral and ethical questions—at what cost should we pursue scientific advances, or seek to control nature? Where is the boundary between the drive to create and the desire for power? What are the effects of social marginalization and isolation?—are more relevant today than ever. In this seminar we will examine the novel both as it engaged earlier cultural works (including Plutarch’s Lives, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and as it morphed over the course of two centuries into a full-blown modern myth. We will consider some of the many afterlives of Frankenstein (including James Whale’s classic films, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Ahmed Saadawi’s absurdist war novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Victor LaValle’s comic book series, The Destroyer, and Rachel Ingalls’s suburban fairy tale, Mrs. Caliban) as a test case for better understanding processes of literary adaptation, remediation, and intertextuality more generally. Students will have the option of producing their own creative adaptation as their culminating project for the course.

Alexis Chema

2025-2026 Spring

Fiction

1650-1830

18th/19th

ENGL 20163 9 Walks: Romantic London on Foot

Students in this course will be invited to reflect on their journeys to and around the city of London alongside representations of walking from the Romantic literary tradition. For the Romantics—William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and others—walking was a powerful source of creative inspiration as well as a means of self-fashioning, contemplation, and learning about the world. Our primary texts will be poems and essays that explore the confluence of walking, thinking, and writing, in London or its environs. Each of our meetings will be organized around a particular walk, route, or trajectory and the set of concerns it suggests: the relation of country to city, urbanization and industrialization, mobility and embodiment, cosmopolitanism, sociability and solitude, and aesthetics.

Prerequisites

Admission to the London Program (study abroad) is required.

Alexis Chema

2025-2026 Autumn

Poetry

18th/19th