Alexis Chema | Department of English Language and Literature

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.

I am completing a book, Adorned: The Romantic Poetics of Ornament, that 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 ornamental 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.

My other ongoing book project is a study of miscellaneousness as an aesthetic and organizing principle in popular bibliographic formats (commonplace books, almanacs, albums, annuals, periodicals). It argues that the growing prominence of the miscellany in the late eighteenth century lays the groundwork for the rise of a modern—that is, phenomenologically-oriented—genre theory. Distinguished by a resistance to classifying principles, the miscellany provided a way of thinking of genre on the whole as a shifting field of interpretation, and not a rigid taxonomic structure.

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

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. Summer 2024.
Review of Reading it Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature by Abigail Williams. Modern Philology 122.2 (July 18, 2024): np.
“Review of The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication by Yohei Igarashi.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 53:3 (December 2020): 259-64.
“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

2024-2025 Courses:

The Print Revolution & New Readers: Women, Workers, Children (graduate)
Poetry in the Land of Childhood (undergraduate)
Greece & Rome: Texts, Traditions, Transformations

Graduate:

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

Undergraduate:

Romantic Poetry and the World
Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley
Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny
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 19205 Poetry in the Land of Childhood

Crosslistings

GNSE 19205

Cupboards and attics, nests and shells, the inside of a bush, the bottom of a rowboat: for the 20th century philosopher Gaston Bachelard, intimate “fibred” spaces like these have a special relation to childhood—both as it is experienced and as it is remembered. Taking the lead from Bachelard this course investigates the construction, beginning in the eighteenth century, of childhood as a particular kind of place, one that might be imaginatively accessed through poetic images, rhythm, and rhyme. Our readings will come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, from the birth of children’s literature to its “golden age”—and will take us from the nursery rhymes and cradle songs of early children’s poetry collections, through William Blake’s “forests of the night,” and to the wonderland of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

Alexis Chema

2024-2025 Spring

Poetry

1650-1830

1830-1990

ENGL 54777 The Print Revolution and New Readers: Women, Workers, Children

In this course we will examine the expansion of print during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its relationship to the social history of reading. One of the most striking features of this so-called “Print Revolution” was the extension of reading material to new groups of readers: by the end of the nineteenth century, more women, working-class, and child readers existed than ever before. In what distinctive ways did these groups participate in print and manuscript culture? What did they read and to what ends? How did literary texts represent, herald, instruct, or proscribe new readers, and how did new readers comply with, subvert, misunderstand, adapt, or otherwise interact with the texts they read? How did the extension of the “reading habit” to new groups of readers impact the political revolutions, intellectual paradigms, and social upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And finally, what kinds of evidence can literary scholars draw upon to make what kinds of claims about reading and readers in the past? We will approach these questions through the lenses of popular literature (especially ballads, chapbooks, satire, and romance) and with the help of literary, historical, and sociological scholarship.

Alexis Chema

2024-2025 Spring

18th/19th