Professor Michael Bradshaw

Biography

I joined the University of Winchester in April 2023. Previously, I have been Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Worcester (2017-23), and Head of the Department of English, History & Creative Writing at Edge Hill University (2009-17). I have also worked at Manchester Metropolitan University, Japan Women’s University, the University of Tokyo, Bristol University, and the University of the West of England. I hold degrees from Cambridge and Bristol.

As Faculty Dean, I have overall responsibility for academic planning and development, and I support the Heads of Department in HSS, but I will also devote as much time as I can to my own teaching and research interests.

I’m a specialist in British Romanticism, especially poetry and drama of the later Romantics. My published critical work includes authors such as: Thomas Lovell Beddoes, John Clare, George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Keats, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Walter Savage Landor, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley. I have also published on aspects of Romantic drama, ‘Romantic generations’, Romantic fragment poems, and the periodical press in the 1820s, as well as the contemporary author Alan Moore. My recent and ongoing work focusses on Critical Disability Studies, applied to Romantic-era and contemporary writing. I would welcome enquiries about postgraduate research in any of these areas.

Areas of expertise

• British Romanticism
• The representation of the body in literature, criticism, and theory
• Fragments in theory and practice
• Canonicity, the work and status of ‘minor’ authors
• Critical Disability Studies
• Literature and laughter
• Literary migration and expatriation

Publications

Books and editions

Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind, and Text, ed. by Michael Bradshaw (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan ‘Literary Disability Studies’ series, 2016); includes Introduction, pp. 1-28 https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46064-6

The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. by Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007)

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book: the 1829 text, ed. by Michael Bradshaw (Manchester and New York: Carcanet / Routledge, 2003)

Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001)

A New Anthology of Modern English Poetry, ed. by Michael Bradshaw, Hisaaki Yamanouchi and Hatsuko Niimi (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 2001)

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Selected Poetry, ed. Michael Bradshaw and Judith Higgens, (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999)

Journal articles and book chapters

‘Beddoes Raising Hell in Germany: a Tale of Student Mobility’, in ‘Romanticism Goes to University’, special issue of Romantic Textualities, ed. by Andrew McInnes (2023)

‘“Its own concentred recompense”: the Impact of Critical Disability Studies on Romanticism’, Humanities, 8(2), 103 (2019) https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020103

‘Alexander’s Expedition: Genre and Conquest in Thomas Beddoes’s Revolutionary Epic’, Essays in Romanticism, 26, 2 (2019), 177-93 https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2019.26.2.7

‘Loitering on the Threshold: Thomas Hood’s Comical Communities’, La questione Romantica – Nuova Serie, 10, 1-2 (2018), 135-46

‘Romantic Generations’, Chapter 10 of The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. by David Duff (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2018), pp. 157-72

McInnes, Andrew, Michael Bradshaw, and Steve Van-Hagen, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Romanticism on Edge’, Romanticism, 24, 2 (2018), 113-17 (also co-editor of this issue)

‘The Jew on Stage and on the Page: Intertextual Exotic’, in Staging the Other in Nineteenth-century British Drama, ed. by Tiziana Morosetti (Berlin, Oxford, and New York: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 41-60 http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0777-1

‘The Miniature Sublime: Later Fortunes of the Cockney Aesthetic’, in Romantic Adaptations: Essays in Mediation and Remediation, ed. by Cian Duffy, Caroline Ruddell, and Peter Howell (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 73-86

‘“The Sleep of Reason”: Swamp Thing and the Intertextual Reader’, in Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition, ed. by Matthew J.A. Green (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 121-39

‘Thomas Hood and the Art of the Leg-Pull: Laughter, Pain, Disability’, La questione Romantica – Nuova Serie, 3, 1: Body / Anatomy issue, ed. Tiziana Morosetti and Norbert Lennartz (2011) [actual date of publication 2013], 117-29

‘Centaur Poetics: Interrupted Forms in Thomas Hood’s Lost Classic’, in A Firm Perswasion: Essays in British Romanticism, ed. by Hatsuko Niimi and Masashi Suzuki (Tokyo: Sairyusha 2012), pp. 213-36

‘Staging Acts of Union in George Darley’s Sylvia; or, the May Queen’, in Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain, 1760-1830, ed. by Gioia Angeletti (Parma: Monte Universitá Parma, 2010), pp. 147-70

‘Third-generation Romantic poets: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon’, Ch. 29 of The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. by Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 542-60

‘Reading as Flight: Fragment Poems from Shelley’s Notebooks’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. by Timothy Webb and Alan Weinberg (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 21-40

‘Bloody John Lacy’: The London Magazine and the Doldrums of English Drama’, in The British Periodical Text, 1797-1832 ed. by Simon Hull (Tirril: Humanities eBooks, 2008), pp. 122-43

‘The Jest-Book, the Body and the State’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. by Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 67-80

‘Hedgehog Theory: How to Read a Romantic Fragment Poem’, Literature Compass, 5, 1 (2008), 73-89

‘Imagining Egypt: Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir’, in La questione Romantica, 12 / 13 (2002), 49-64 [actual date of publication 2005]

‘Burying and Praising the Minor Romantic: The Case of George Darley’, Poetica, 54 (2001), 93-106 (also guest editor of this issue)

‘Reading and Surface in Keats’s “The Eve of St Mark”’, Studies in English and American Literature (Tokyo), 35 (2000), 97-115

‘Beddoes and the Poetics of Fragmentation’, Agenda, 37, 2-3 (1999), 264-80

‘Resurrecting Thomas Lovell Beddoes’, in The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism, ed. by Sharon Ruston (Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment vol. 153) (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1999), pp. 139-57

‘Mary Shelley’s Last Man (The End of the World as We Know It)’, in Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity – Extrapolation – Speculation, ed. by Peter Stockwell and Derek Littlewood (Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature 17) (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), pp.163-76

Survey writing

‘Landor, Walter Savage, Imaginary Conversations’, in The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee and Diane Long Hoeveler, 3 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 772-76

‘Elizabethan Style in Drama’, in The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, ed. by Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee and Diane Long Hoeveler, 3 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 415-21

‘Walter Savage Landor’, in The Literary Encyclopedia (‘people table’) (2004): http://www.litencyc.com/

‘George Darley’, in The Literary Encyclopedia (‘people table’) (2004): http://www.litencyc.com/

Critical biography of Thomas Lovell Beddoes for Literature Online (Chadwyck-Healey, 2000): http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/

Teaching resources

Bradshaw, Michael et al, Supervising Dissertations at Masters Level: A Guide to Good Practice (University of Worcester, 2021)

Bradshaw, Michael and Suzanne Lawson, Making Feedback Count: Style Guide for Tutors (University of Worcester, 2018)

‘English in the Electronic Age: A World Language?’ English II (Japan Women’s University, 2000), pp. 1-20