Elisa Cozzi

elisa cozzi
Post-Award Member
The Queen's College
elisa.cozzi@queens.ox.ac.uk

 

Thesis: 'Italy and the Irish Romantics: Irish-Italian Networks, Narratives, and Literary Culture, 1785–1835'

 

Supervisor: Professor Fiona Stafford

 

Viva passed with no corrections on 13 December 2024. 

 

Current projects: In 2025-26, I will be based at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow (ecozzi@nd.edu)

 

I am currently working on a book-length study of Irish–Italian literary and cultural exchanges. Italy and the Irish Romantics: Irish–Italian Networks, Narratives, and Manuscript Culture, 1785–1835 argues for Italianism as an essential current in Irish Romanticism, permeating all strata of Irish culture—from the eighteenth-century antiquarian tradition to the literary nationalism of the nineteenth century—and linking Ireland’s cultural geography to the centre of Revolutionary Europe. The book uncovers the previously unexamined papers of the Irish members of the Byron–Shelley circle in Pisa, including Margaret Mount Cashell, George William Tighe, and John Taaffe. The poems, novels, correspondence, and diaries that have come to light in the archives of their descendants provide crucial evidence for the pervasive use of Italian culture to forge Irish Romanticism.

 

Alongside my first monograph, I will begin a second research project at the University of Notre Dame, ‘The Irish Idea: Ireland and British Romanticism, 1798–1829’, which explores how Irish ideas helped define debates about nationhood and identity in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing for their centrality to a broader archipelagic understanding of London’s literary culture. By uncovering Ireland’s role at the centre of British literary and political life, the project sheds new light on the intertwined histories of the two nations and connects past debates on sovereignty and belonging to present-day questions about borders, migration, and the legacy of empire.

 

I am one of four editors of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a three-volume edition of Shelley’s letters under contract with Oxford University Press, containing all known letters edited from manuscripts according to an innovative textual methodology (with volumes scheduled for publication in 2027, 2030, and 2036). My articles and reviews are published or forthcoming in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, The Byron Journal, The Keats-Shelley Review, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. I have two commissioned chapters currently in preparation, one on Leopardi’s European reception and another for The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Poetry.

 

I completed my doctorate in English Language and Literature at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, funded by a Baillie Gifford scholarship and the Clarendon Fund. I received my BA from the University of York and my MSt from Oxford. I have held early-career visiting fellowships at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen (2025), and at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, Queen Mary University of London (2023).

 

I have taught a range of classes and supervised dissertations at undergraduate and master’s levels in English and Irish literature from 1660 to the present. Before moving to Notre Dame, I was a Retaining Fee Lecturer in English at Somerville College. I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

 

My wider research interests include Irish Romanticism; the Byron–Shelley circle; Anglo-Italian literature; literary networks in the long eighteenth century; manuscript culture and the digital humanities; and literary influence and allusion.

 

Public engagement: I was the organiser and curator of a public symposium & exhibition on the cultural history of air ballooning, held at The Queen’s College in February 2024. In October 2022, I co-organised the interdisciplinary Vesuvius22 Conference, accompanied by a public lecture and an exhibition at the Weston Library and funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and The Wellcome Trust.

 

Other projects: In 2022, I was the Programme Coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Programme at TORCH and the co-convenor, with Fiona Stafford, of the Environmental Humanities Lunchtime Seminar. I am a contributor to Bysshe Inigo Coffey’s digital database of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s illustrated editions, soon to be turned into a website hosted by the University of Oxford.

 

Publications:

  • Journal article: ‘P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of “The Sensitive-Plant”’. Romanticism 30.1 (2024), pp. 42-55.
  • Review: Valentina Varinelli, Italian Impromptus: A Study of P.B. Shelley's Writings in Italian with an Annotated Edition. European Romantic Review 35.1 (2024), pp. 187-191.
  • Review: Will Bowers, The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815–1823. The Keats-Shelley Review 36.1 (2022), pp. 47-50.

On-going and forthcoming:

  • Reference entry: ‘Taaffe, John’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (submitted).
  • Reference entry: ‘The Poetical Works of Percy B. Shelley. Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1865’. Digital Gallery of Illustrated Editions of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1851-1922, edited by Bysshe Inigo Coffey. Website Database, University of Oxford (submitted).
  • Journal article: ‘Byron’s Irish Avatars’, The Byron Journal (submitted)
  • Book chapter: ‘Leopardi’s Pisan Circle: The Accademia dei Lunatici, The Ausonian, and The First English Translation from the Operette Morali’. In Giacomo Leopardi: Reading, Reception and Legacy in Europe. Edited by Paul Hamilton and Francesco Marchionni (in preparation).
  • Co-authored journal article: '"Into the court of lost time": Lady Mount Cashell’s Unpublished Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin’ (in preparation).

 

Conference papers and invited talks:

  • 'Two New Manuscripts of Byron’s “The Irish Avatar” in the Holland House Papers’, 49th International Byron Conference, University of Pisa, 2025.

  • 'Byron's Irish Avatars', Newstead Abbey Byron Conference, 2025

  • ‘Byron and Irish-Italian Freedom', Byron 200 Public Lecture Series, Keats-Shelley House, Rome, 2025.

  • ‘From Dánta Grá to Dante: Irish-Italian Genealogies, 1350-1850’, The Oxford Celtic Seminar, Jesus College, University of Oxford, 2024

  • ‘John Taaffe’s Defence of Poetry’. The Shelley Conference, Keats House, London, 2024.

  • ‘Dante and Cosmopolitan Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’. The Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society Conference (ECIS), University of Galway, 2024.

  • ‘Shelley, Éire, and Air Balloons’. Oxford Balloons, Enlightenment Science, and the Poetry of Flight. Symposium. The Queen’s College, Oxford, February 2024.

  • 'History and Nationhood in the Shelley Circle: Margaret Mount Cashell’s Unpublished Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin'. The 16th Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Rome, July 2023. 
  • 'The Taaffe Papers: Dispersal and Recovery'. Editing Romantic Letters Colloquium. University of Birmingham, May 2023.
  • 'P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of "The Sensitive-Plant"'. The Shelley Conference 2022. Keats House, London, July 2022.
  • 'Lady Mount Cashell’s Unpublished Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin and Anglo-Irish-Italian Romantic Networks'. British Romanticism and Europe International Conference. Ascona, Switzerland, June 2022.
  • 'On First Looking into Lady Mount Cashell’s Historical Novel The Chieftains of Erin'. ECIS (Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society) Conference. University College Cork, June 2022.
  • 'P.B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of "The Sensitive-Plant"'. Romantic Research Seminar. Balliol College, University of Oxford, June 2022.
  • 'Irish-Italian Literary Networks, 1815-1835'. Romanticism Across Borders Research Seminar. University of Paris, May 2022.
  • 'Anglo-Irish-Italian Literary Networks from Dublin to Pisa, 1791-1835'. The Queen's College Symposium. University of Oxford, May 2021.
  • 'Dante among the Irish Romantics: The Case of John Taaffe’s A Comment on the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1822)'. Distance 2020 International Postgraduate Conference. August 2020, online.
  • 'In darkness found a dwelling place’: "The Prisoner of Chillon" and Byron’s turn away from Nature'. The 12th International Student Byron Conference. Messolonghi, Greece, May 2017.

 

Twitter: @_ElisaCozzi