Jonathan Perris

Thesis title: The infection of London: Cultural contamination and metropolitan class culture, 1790-1839

Supervisor: Dr Timothy Michael

Research interests: political discourse and satire in the Romantic period; aesthetics; the Gothic; colonial and anti-colonial discourse; the British empire and slave trade; class, economics and literary culture; the history of literary and cultural theory.

Teaching: I am a Graduate Teaching and Research Scholar in English 1700-1850 at Oriel College, where I tutor on FHS Paper 4 (1660-1760), FHS Paper 5 (1760-1830), and Prelims Paper 3 (1830-1910).

Doctoral research: My research examines how a number of imperial attitudes and cultural motifs emerged from the literary culture of eighteenth-century London. In particular, the thesis studies the affect, imagery and narrative techniques of political discourse and literature alongside representations of metropolitan class restructuring as a result of expanding empire and capital markets. I suggest corollaries between these and the common trope that British society was in various ways being 'contaminated' by contact with revolutionary France and colonial India.

Publications:  'God lives in the Sun': The subversion of Eurocentrism in William Blake's 'The Little Black Boy' (European Romantic Review, 2023); this paper examines the connection between Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Blake's 'The Little Black Boy', suggesting the latter as a direct and sardonic response to the liminal voice constructed in slave narratives such as the former.