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-organiser of the interdisciplinary arboreal research group, Tree Talks, with Dr Anna Burton, and I co-convene the Midlands Romantic Seminar with Dr Paul Whickman. 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; and influence and allusion. I have additional research interests in material culture; visual culture; print culture; manuscript studies; vegan studies; metal studies; and the environmental humanities.

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, 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.

Recent publications

2020-Present

Special issues:

Book chapters:

Journal articles:

Reviews:

Membership of professional bodies

Qualifications

Recent conferences

2020-Present

Conference organisation:

Conference papers:

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 welcome prospective PhD students in any of my research areas.

Additional interests and activities

I am the Early Career Representative for the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), having previously served as a Postgraduate Representative since 2019. Prior to this, I served as a Communications Fellow for the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA) from 2018-2019.

I am an organiser of the Shelley Conference in London and from 2021 to 2022 I organised a series of #Shelley200 digital events and initiatives to commemorate the bicentenary of the poet's death in 1822.

I am a contributor to the 'Literature 1780-1830: The Romantic Period, General and Prose' section of The Year's Work in English Studies.

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.