Dr Paul Whickman

About

Senior Lecturer in English

Teaching responsibilities

1st Year

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

2nd Year

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

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)
Enlightenment: The Ferment of Ideas (MLit/MHist, Module Leader)

Research interests

My research interests lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (primarily Romanticism), and censorship and free speech more widely. I have recently completed a monograph titled Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature: Creativity in the Writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley, appearing with Palgrave in 2020. I have published articles in journals such as the Keats-Shelley Review and was previously a contributor to the Year's Work in English Studies (2015-2018). I was also an academic advisor on Lord Byron for Gale/Cengage's Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism series. Particular writers of interest include Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats and Byron.

Additional research interests include the intersection of poetry and philosophy; the poetics of temporality; poetry, sound and voice; the relationship between the vernacular and the literary.

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

I am currently the chair of the Identity, Culture and Representation research cluster (ICR) and co-organiser of the Midlands Romantic Seminar.

Membership of professional bodies

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS)
British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS)

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)

'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.

Recent publications

Since 2013

Under review

2020/2021. ‘“‘[Q]uiet as a stone, / Still as the silence’: Reading Time, Sound, and Silence in John Keats’ for Romanticism, Edinburgh University Press (article)

Published

2020. '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