Alex Benchimol B.A., M.Phil, M.A., Ph.D.
- Comparative Cultural Studies in the Romantic Period
- Radical Intellectual Culture in the Romantic Period
- Scottish Enlightenment Studies
- Postgraduate Convener
Room 311, 5 University Gardens
telephone: 0141 330 2695
e-mail: A.Benchimol@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
Biography
Dr. Alex Benchimol has been teaching in the Department since 2003 and is currently Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural History. He was educated at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio where he studied English and History, and holds Masters degrees in Cultural Studies and English from the Universities of Glasgow and Toronto, respectively. He completed a doctorate in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow in 2001. His dissertation, ‘Intellectual Formations in the Romantic Period: A Comparative Study of Cultural Politics and Social Criticism in the British Public Sphere, 1802-32’, charts the contested development of cultural criticism in Britain during the early nineteenth century.This was developed into a monograph Intellectual Politics and Radical Culture in the Romantic Period, published by Ashgate in 2010: click here.
Dr. Benchimol has lectured on and taught nineteenth and twentieth-century American Literature, Romantic Literature, and cultural theory, and administered the Masters programme in Romanticism and the Forms of Modernity from 2003-07. Along with colleagues from the Departments of English Literature and Scottish Literature he is currently developing a new Masters programme in Enlightenment, Romanticism and Nation, to be offered for the 2008/09 academic session. Dr. Benchimol’s primary research interests include Romantic period studies, British cultural studies, cultural theory, cultural historiography and the Scottish Enlightenment. He is particularly interested in supervising postgraduate research on any aspect of radical intellectual culture of the romantic period, periodical culture of the long eighteenth century, and theoretical approaches to British intellectual and cultural history. He has contributed articles, reviews and review essays to such journals as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Textual Practice, Romantic Circles Reviews, Romanticism, Thesis Eleven, Radical Philosophy and The European Legacy.
Dr. Benchimol co-edited, with Professor Willy Maley, a volume of essays on the public sphere from a distinguished line up of international contributors. The book, Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas, was published by Peter Lang European Academic Press in 2007. He has recently completed a monograph based on his doctoral research for Ashgate’s Nineteenth-Century Studies Series, Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period: Scottish Whigs, English Radicals and the Making of the British Public Sphere (2010).