Jessica Fay

Jessica Fay

Department of English Literature
Assistant Professor in English Literature (Enterprise, Engagement, and Impact)

I study eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature (chiefly the work of William and Dorothy Wordsworth). I am interested in patterns of formal and generic innovation, and in exploring how memory, imagination, and art shape the identities of places and people

Qualifications

  • DPhil, University of Oxford
  • MA and BA, University of Liverpool

Biography

After taking an MA at the University of Liverpool, I was fortunate to win a Lamb and Flag Doctoral Scholarship at St John’s College, Oxford. On completing my doctorate, I moved to the Department of English at the University of Bristol where I held a Teaching Fellowship followed by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship. I joined the University of Birmingham in 2018.  

Teaching

I have taught a wide range of literature from the medieval period to the present, with particular interests in poetry and works of the long nineteenth century. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Postgraduate supervision

I currently co-supervise doctoral work on modernist gardening-as-historiography and on the nineteenth-century painter William Collins. I would be delighted to discuss potential research projects in any area of Romanticism (especially those focusing on William and Dorothy Wordsworth), place-writing, or the relationship between poetry and painting.


Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

My research reaches across eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature; it is critical, biographical, and editorial; it focuses on three main areas:

 

Arts of Place: Arts of Place is a cross-disciplinary research network, which I co-lead with Professor Alexandra Harris. It launched in October 2020 as a forum for new work on landscape and environment both within and beyond the University of Birmingham. It is a vibrant meeting point for graduates, academics, external specialists, and all those who care about what we make of our surroundings. 

 

William Wordsworth and Romanticism: As a Wordsworthian, I am interested in the feelings and memories that become attached to specific environments and how they are captured and communicated through literature. I have published widely on various aspects of Wordsworth’s poetry and his significance in Romantic-period literary history.

 

Relationships between Verbal and Visual Arts: Another strand of my research brings together art history and literary criticism. My edition of The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family (Liverpool, 2021) is a foundation for exploring how relationships between writers, artists, and patrons helped reshape formal and generic trends in nineteenth-century poetry and landscape art. My current book project explores why the kinship between poetry and painting came under attack in the second half of the eighteenth century and how this changed the ways in which Cowper, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Austen, and Scott experienced and presented their local environments.  

Other activities

I am a contributor to the National Trust’s Trusted Source project. See ‘What is the Picturesque?’ (The National Trust: Trusted Source, 2016).

In 2016, I was a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House Library where I explored the collection of eighteenth-century women’s writing, tracing connections between abolitionist literature, consumerism, and female education.

I hold an Honorary Research Associateship at the University of Bristol.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Fay, J 2021, The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803-1829: With a Study of the Creative Exchange between Wordsworth and Beaumont. Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850, Liverpool University Press. <https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/54482/>

Fay, J 2018, Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community. Oxford English Monographs, SIPRI/Oxford University Press.

Article

Fay, J 2022, 'George Crabbe and the place of amusement', The Review of English Studies, vol. 73, no. 311, pp. 746-761. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgab095

Fay, J 2022, 'Shelley and Tennyson under The Rainbow', Essays in Criticism, vol. 72, no. 2, pp. 208-229. https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgac013

Fay, J 2020, 'Wordsworth's Excursion and the Rainbow of Rubens', Charles Lamb Bulletin, vol. 171, no. Summer 2020, pp. 53-74.

Fay, J 2018, 'Rhythm and Repetition at Dove Cottage', Philological Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 1, pp. 73-95. <https://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/publications/rhythm-and-repetition-at-dove-cottage(e124e232-1182-4bca-a695-2eaba9afc78e).html>

Fay, J 2018, 'Sketching and the Acquisition of Taste', The Review of English Studies, vol. 69, no. 291, pp. 706-724. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgx138

Fay, J 2017, 'Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Sir George Beaumont', The Coleridge Bulletin, vol. 49. <https://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/publications/coleridge-wordsworth-and-sir-george-beaumont(6830fc91-3711-4497-9a08-30bd3b796b9a).html>

Fay, J 2016, 'A Question of Loyalty: Wordsworth and the Beaumonts, Catholic Emancipation and Ecclesiastical Sketches', Romanticism, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0253

Fay, J 2016, 'Wordsworth's Northumbria: Bede, Cuthbert, and Northern Medievalism', Modern Language Review, vol. 111, no. 4, pp. 917-935. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.111.4.0917

Chapter

Fay, J 2022, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855). in AR Hawkins, C Blackwell & L Bonds (eds), The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers. Routledge, pp. 535-545.

Book/Film/Article review

Fay, J 2019, 'Review of Sarah Zimmerman, The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain', Modern Language Review.

Fay, J 2018, 'Review of Colin Jager, Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age', Studies in Romanticism, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 339-342.

Fay, J 2015, 'Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (eds). The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth. Pp. xxv + 868 (Oxford Handbooks of Literature). Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2015. Cloth, £110.', The Review of English Studies, vol. 65, no. 277, pp. 996-999. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgv051

Other contribution

Fay, J 2017, What is the Picturesque?. The National Trust. <https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/what-is-the-picturesque->

View all publications in research portal