Nicholas Halmi

Margaret Candfield Tutorial Fellow in English; Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Fellow Librarian

Teaching

At Univ, I teach literature of 1910 to the present and literary theory to first-year undergraduates and literature of 1760–1830 to second-years. In the English Faculty I lecture on literature of 1760–1830. At the postgraduate I teach MSt courses on literature and thought of the ‘long eighteenth century’ (c. 1660–c. 1830), as well as on genres and modes (epic, allegory). I also supervise MSt dissertations and DPhil theses in areas broadly related to my research.

Research

While I teach primarily British literature, my research interests are much broader, encompassing western European literature, thought, and visual arts from the Renaissance onwards. What especially interests me are intellectual and artistic responses to the challenges and discontents of modernity (understood, whether rightly or wrongly, as involving radical ruptures from past). My work, which has appeared in Italian and French translation, ranges in subject from the concept of Romanticism and related topics and writers (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, German Romantic philosophy and architecture, Anglo-German and Anglo-Italian cultural exchange, etc.) to allegory and imaginary ruins to twentieth-century criticism (Ezra Pound, Walter Benjamin, Northrop Frye) and questions of periodisation. At present I’m completing a study of the rise of historicising thought and conflicting attitudes towards the past in European aesthetic theory and artistic practice from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century.

I am a member of the Zentrum für Klassikforschung (Research Centre for European Classicism) of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Germany’s second-largest cultural institution. An interview with me about aspects of my research on Romanticism was conducted by the Cambridge Centre for International Research and published on YouTube in April 2024.

Selected Publications

Books

History’s Forms: Historicization, Aesthetics, and the Past (in progress)

Editor, Norton Critical Edition of Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (2013; corr. 2nd printing, 2017; 3rd printing, 2021)

The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford, 2007)

Co-editor, Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (2003; 6th printing, 2017)

Textual editor, Opus Maximum, vol. 15 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton, 2002)

Articles

‘Généalogie du cliché’, Revue de literature comparée, 388 (2023), 403–16

‘Transcendental Revolutions’, in P. Vincent (ed.), The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature (2023), pp. 223–54

‘Coleridge’s Philosophies’, in T. Fulford (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2022), pp.

‘Romantic Thinking’, in P. Vassilopoulou and D. Whistler (eds.), Thought: A Philosophical History (2021), pp. 61–74 (on Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel)

‘European Romanticism: Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch’, in W. Breckman and P. Gordon, The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (2019), vol. 1, pp. 40–64

For a complete list see my personal website. PDFs of many of my publications are available on my academia.edu site.