I am interested in everything literary from 1900 to the present, especially poetry. My first book project,T. S. Eliot and the Making of Reputation, explored Eliot's approach to - and anxieties about - matters of self-fashioning. It used the wealth of new primary material made available by recent editions of his work to argue that Eliot was not only an expert cultural marketer, but that he also used his poems to criticise the very strategies that were used to promote them.
In addition to Eliot, I have published on a variety of topics, from love letters to student notebooks, artistic 'brattiness' to the poetry of Generation Rent. I am currently interested in ideas of creativity in poetry, asking how our understanding of genius, inspiration, pedagogy, and spontaneity might require revision in the age of AI.
For the English course at Oxford, I have taught Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language and Literature), Paper 3 (1830-1910), and Paper 4 (1910-Present), as well as supervising undergraduate FHS dissertations on various topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture. I also contribute to the teaching of visiting students, and in the past I have devised courses on modernism, poetry and philosophy, 20th century Christian writing, and Victorian novels.
Books
Nicholas Smart, T. S. Eliot and the Making of Reputation (under contract with Oxford University Press)
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles and Chapters in Edited Collections
Nicholas Smart, 'Textbook Heaney', English [forthcoming]
Nicholas Smart, 'Bret/BRAT', Critical Quarterly 68.2 (2026)
Nicholas Smart, 'Anxious Attachments: Eliot's Enclosures to Emily Hale', in T. S. Eliot Studies Annual: Volume 8, ed. Kevin Rulo and Craig Woelfel (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2026), 183-205
Nicholas Smart, 'F. O. Matthiessen's New College Notebook', New College Notes 24.7 (2025), 1-12
Nicholas Smart, 'Larkin's Rented World', About Larkin 59 (2025), 6-15
Nicholas Smart, 'T. S. Eliot and the Problem of the Archive', ELH: English Literary History 90.3 (2023), 851-81
Nicholas Smart, 'Matthew Arnold, Zadie Smith, and the Function of Contempt at the Present Time', Winner of the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize (2022)
