Staff profile

Dr Amanda Blake Davis


She / Her

Lecturer in English Literature

Amanda Blake Davis reading a book.

Subject

English, Creative Writing and Publishing

College

College of Arts, Humanities and Education

Department

Humanities

Research centre

Identity, Culture and Representation Research Centre

ORCiD ID

0000-0001-7908-8858

Email

a.davis2@derby.ac.uk

About

I am a Lecturer in English Literature. My research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and culture, with particular emphasis on Romantic poetry. I am especially interested in Percy Bysshe Shelley, and I am currently preparing my first monograph, Shelley and Androgyny, alongside a project provisionally entitled Shelley's Trees: Intermedial Ecologies.I am co-editor of the collection, Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum (Liverpool University Press), and co-organiser of the interdisciplinary arboreal research group, the Tree Cultures Network, with Dr Anna Burton. I co-convene the Midlands Romantic Seminar with Dr Paul Whickman and I am a member of the Enlightenment and Romanticism Research Cluster.

Research interests

My primary research interests are in Romanticism; poetry and poetics; form; aesthetics; classical reception; influence and allusion; intermediality and intertextuality; and the environmental humanities, particularly the arboreal humanities. I have additional research interests in material culture; visual culture; print culture; manuscript studies; vegan studies; and metal studies.

I am currently preparing my first monograph, Shelley and Androgyny. My monograph analyses androgyny as a psychic merger in Shelley's poetry alongside his readings and translation of Plato's Symposium, with attention to Plato's implication of the reader as an interlocutor.

I began my current project, provisionally entitled Shelley's Trees: Intermedial Ecologies, as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature in 2021. This project explores drawings of trees in Shelley's manuscripts through what I term the poet's 'intermedial ecology', where manuscripts foster an environment of visual and textual interrelations.

I am co-editor of the collection, Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum (Liverpool University Press), with Dr Anna Burton. The collection considers how the arboretum, though a man-made space that groups trees formally, is also an environment in which more can be understood about the individuality of all trees on an interconnected, global scale. Grounded in the literature of the Romantic period, this project proposes that the ‘arboretum’, a term coined by John Claudius Loudon in 1838, is implicit within Romantic writers’ interest in specific trees, and culminates in 1840 with the opening of the first public arboretum, Derby Arboretum.

Recent publications

2020-Present

Books

Special issues

Book chapters

Journal articles

Reviews

Membership of professional bodies

Qualifications

Recent conferences

2020-Present

Conference organisation

Keynote lectures

Conference papers

In the media

Teaching responsibilities

I teach across the BA (Hons) English programme. I lead the English cohort of the undergraduate module, 'Research in Practice', and I teach on the following postgraduate modules:

I supervise dissertations at undergraduate and postgraduate level. I am currently accepting proposals from prospective PhD students.

Pile of old books

Ahead of the bicentenary of the death of major Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley on July 8, 2022, Amanda Blake Davis and Paul Whickman consider the influence of Derby and the Derbyshire region on Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley.