Dr Timothy Michael

I am a literary critic and scholar of the long eighteenth century, with special interests in the history of ideas, the history of criticism, philology and rhetoric, and political theory. I studied English and Philosophy at New York University (BA 2002) and received my PhD in English from Harvard University in 2009. Before coming to Oxford in 2013, I taught at Loyola University Maryland and, as a member of the Society of Fellows, at the University of Chicago. 

My research rests broadly at the intersection of literary and intellectual history from 1688 to 1832. My first book, British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason (JHUP 2016), examines how figures such as Burke, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley responded to a set of questions that very much remain with us: What role should reason play in the creation of a free and just society? Can we claim certain knowledge in a field as complex as politics? How can the cause of political rationalism be advanced when it is seen as having blood on its hands? The argument of the book is that much of the literature at the heart of British Romanticism is a trial, or a critique, of reason in its political capacities and a test of the kinds of knowledge available to it.

I am currently at work on two projects: with Paddy Bullard, a scholarly edition of Alexander Pope’s late prose and a critical history of criticism in the long eighteenth century.