Jonathan Perris

Thesis title: Sensational contamination: Metropolitan culture and British Romantic nationalism

Supervisor: Dr Timothy Michael

Research interests:

Jonathan’s research broadly sits across the literature and cultural history of the Romantic and early Victorian periods. He is particularly focused on British nationalism and imperialism, aesthetics, political discourse and satire, travel writing, radical culture, the Gothic, and the British Empire and slave trade. He also has an abiding interest in the relationship between literary and cultural theory. 

His doctoral thesis examines representations of national contamination in the Romantic period. Providing a literary, cultural and intellectual history of these representations, the thesis explores how a number of nationalist attitudes and cultural motifs emerged from eighteenth-century aesthetic conceptions and the sensational metropolitan culture of London. The thesis suggests that these came to be pivotal in the emergence of British identity and Romantic nationalism. 

Teaching:

Jonathan is a Graduate Teaching and Research Scholar at Oriel College, where he teaches literature in English from 1700 to 1850, offering classes and tutorials for undergraduate Paper 4 (1660–1760), Paper 5 (1760–1830), and Prelims 3 (1830–1910). 

Publications:  

Jonathan Perris (2024), ‘“THUGGEE IN LONDON!”: Metropolitan Culture and the Invention of the Thug,’ (forthcoming). 

Jonathan Perris (2023), ‘God Lives in the Sun: The Critique of Evangelical Abolitionism in William Blake's “The Little Black Boy”,’ European Romantic Review, 34:6, 629-645, DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2023.2272890 

Jonathan Perris (2019), ‘Whirlwinds of Empire: Subversion and the Gothic in William Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth,’ Vides, 225-238.