Dr Paul Whickman

About

I am a Senior Lecturer in English and a Programme Leader for MA English. I'm also a Fellow of the English Association (FEA).

Research interests

My research interests lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (primarily Romanticism), and censorship and free speech more widely. My monograph, titled Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature: Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley, was published by Palgrave in 2020. I have published articles in journals such as the Keats-Shelley Review and the Keats-Shelley Journal and was previously a contributor to the Year's Work in English Studies (2015-2018). I was also an academic advisor on both Lord Byron and Percy Shelley for Gale/Cengage's Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism and Poetry Criticism series. I have also published chapters in The Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and Censorship (Routledge, 2023) and Free Speech Wars (MUP, 2021). Particular writers of interest include Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats and Byron.

I am currently working on two books. The first is a short book on eighteenth-century legacies in Romantic poetry with the working title Romantic Poetry and the Eighteenth Century: New Approaches to Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. I am also working on a longer work provisionally titled Poetry, Sound and Voice in the Long Eighteenth Century that interrogates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of written poetry's relationship to sound.

Additional research interests include the intersection of poetry and philosophy; poetry and religion: the poetics of temporality; poetry, sound and voice; the relationship between the vernacular and the literary; eighteenth-century legacies; Romantic Derbyshire.

I am currently supervising a PhD project on the Literary Heritage of the Derwent Valley and look forward to hearing from potential students interested in any of the above or related topics.

I am the chair of the Identity, Culture and Representation research cluster (ICR) and co-chair of the Enlightenment and Romanticism Research cluster.

Recent publications

Since 2013

In Press

2025. ‘Blood, Blasphemy and Bad Dads: Blasphemy and The Cenci’ for Keats-Shelley Journal (article)

Published

2023. ‘Literary Influence and Legal Precedent: Censorship in the Court of Chancery, 1710-1823’ in Julian Petley and John Steel (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and Censorship (London: Routledge, 2023), (book chapter), pp. 46-55
2021. 'Teaching ''Freedom of Speech Freely'', in Free Speech Wars: How Did We Get Here and Why Does it Matter? Ed. Charlotte Lydia Riley, Manchester University Press (book chapter), pp.192-199
2020. Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature: Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Palgrave (monograph)
2018. ‘Romantic Poetry: General and L-Z 2016’ in XIII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period, for Year’s Work in English Studies (Vol. 97), Oxford University Press (review article)
2018. ‘Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam: Revisions as Transition’, for The Keats-Shelley Review, (Vol. 32:2), pp. 102-112 (article)
2017. ‘Romantic Poetry: General and L-Z 2015’ in XIII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period, for Year’s Work in English Studies (Vol. 96), Oxford University Press (Chapter available online)
2016. ‘The Poet as Sage, Sage as Poet in 1816: Aesthetics and Epistemology in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”’, for The Keats-Shelley Review, (Vol. 30.2), pp. 142-154 (article)
2016. ‘Romantic Poetry: L-Z 2014’ in XIII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period, for Year’s Work in English Studies (Vol. 95), Oxford University Press, pp. 678-745 (Chapter available online)
2013. ‘Ode to the West Wind’, commissioned article for The Literary Encyclopedia

Membership of professional bodies

Fellow of the English Association
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Trustee of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation

Qualifications

BA (Hons) English Language and Literature (Leeds)
MA (with Distinction) Romantic Formations (Leeds)
PhD 'Romantic Blasphemy: Sacrilege and Creativity in the Literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley' (Nottingham)
PGCHE

Recent conferences

Conference presentations and invited papers (since 2013)

'Then, What is Life?': Shelley's End(ing)s and the Posthumous Life of Poetry', The Wordsworth Summer Conference 2024, Rydal Hall, Cumbria, August 2024.
'Then, What is Life?': Shelley's End(ing)s and the Posthumous Life of Poetry', The Shelley Conference 2024, Keats House, Hampstead, June 2024.
'That Son will be a sacrifice: Byron and Jesus', Newstead Abbey Byron Society Conference 2024, Newstead, Notts., April 2024.
‘Whining over a dead ass: Byron and Laurence Sterne’, The Wordsworth Summer Conference 2023, Rydal Hall, Cumbria, August 2023
‘Whining over a dead ass: Byron and Laurence Sterne’, Byron Society Invited Lecture, Art Workers Guild, London, July 2023
‘Shelley: An English Radical in Italy, 200th Anniversary Lecture’, Invited lecture, Marymount College, Rome, February 2023 (Online)
'"Will no one tell me what she sings?" Writing, Reading, and Listening in Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper"', The Wordsworth Summer Conference 2022, Rydal Hall, Cumbria, August 2022
'"Will no one tell me what she sings?" Writing, Reading, and Listening in Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper"', ‘New Romanticisms’, The British Association of Romantic Studies, Edge Hill University, August 2022
‘“Blaspheme Not”: Blasphemy and The Cenci, The Shelley Conference 2022, Keats House, Hampstead, July 2022
'A drop of ink instead of speech: Writing and Voice in Don Juan', Newstead Abbey Byron Society Conference 2022, Newstead, Notts., April 2022
'Shelley's Queen Mab: Piracy and Early Textual History, The British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS), Nottingham, July 2019
'Power, Prosody, Personification: (Un)fixing Fixity in Shelley's "Mont Blanc"', The British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS), Nottingham, July 2019
'Shelley's Queen Mab: Piracy and Early Textual History', The Wordsworth Summer Conference 2018, Rydal Hall, Cumbria, August 2018
'"Unimaginable ether!" Byronic mise en abyme in Manfred and Cain', The International Byron Society Conference 2018, Ravenna, Italy, July 2018
'Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam: Revisions as Transition', P.B. Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam: Texts, Subtexts, Contexts, American Academy in Rome, December 2017
'Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam: Revisions as Transition', The Shelley Conference 2017, Senate House, University of London, September 2017
'"Unimaginable ether!" Byronic mise en abyme in Manfred and Cain', The Wordsworth Summer Conference 2017, Rydal Hall, Cumbria, August 2017
'The Age of Toleration: Blasphemy, Aesthetics and Copyright in the Long Eighteenth Century', British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) Annual Conference, St Hugh's College Oxford, January 2017
'Poet as Sage, Sage as Poet: Aesthetics and Epistemology in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"', The Wordsworth Summer Conference 2015, Rydal Hall, Cumbria, August 2015
'"A joy for ever": Monumental Moments and Paradox in the Poetry of John Keats', John Keats: Poet-Physician, Physician-Poet, Guy's Hospital, London, May 2015
Invited Panel Speaker at The Writers’ Conference 2015, ‘Freedom to Write?’, Nottingham, March 2015
'"A joy for ever": Monumental Moments and Paradox in the Poetry of John Keats', The Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar, University of Nottingham (Invited Paper), February 2015
'"A joy for ever": The Paradoxes of Transience and Temporality in the Poetry of John Keats', The Wordsworth Summer Conference 2014, Rydal Hall, Cumbria, August 2014
'Diseased and Injurious Texts: The Problem of Free Speech in the Long Eighteenth Century' (1660-1822), Fashionable Diseases, Northumbria and Newcastle Universities, July 2014
‘An “Injurious” Text: Southey v. Sherwood and the Importance of Wat Tyler in Romantic Print History’, Robert Southey and Romanticism: The Lake School in Context, Keswick, Cumbria, July 2013
'Blasphemy, Sedition and Copyright, 1709 - 1826', Gendering the Book in the Long Eighteenth Century, University of Leeds, July 2013

In the media

I was a contributor to the Radio 4 series 'Pride or Prejudice: How We Read Now', first broadcast in 2021. I appear in episode 2, 'Teaching Novels', about teaching material deemed offensive or otherwise subject to censorship.

Teaching responsibilities

1st Year

Mutants and Monsters: Interpreting Fantasy (Module Leader)
Enlightenment Literature (Module Leader)

2nd Year

Nineteenth-Century Realism: Conscience and Context (Module Leader)

3rd Year

Eighteenth-Century Literature: Terror, Wit and Letters of Love (Module Leader)

Postgraduate

Taking and Making Offence: Blasphemy, Obscenity and Censorship from Milton to Rushdie (Module Leader)
Laughter and the Carnivalesque (Module Leader)
Theory, Culture and Criticism