Professor Nigel Leask, MA, PhD, FEA, FRSE
Regius Professor of English Language and Literature
- Romantic literature and culture
- Romantic engagements with Empire
- Travel writing
- Anglo-Indian literature of the Romantic period
- Burns and Scottish literature of the 1790s
Room 304, 4 University Gardens
telephone: 0141 330 4165
e-mail: N.Leask@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
Biography
Nigel Leask was appointed to Glasgow's Regius Chair in English Language and Literature in September 2004. He was previously Reader in Romantic Literature in the English Faculty at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. His first book The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought was published by Macmillan in 1988.
Subsequently, he has published widely in the area of romantic literature and culture, with a special emphasis on empire, orientalism, and travel writing. His British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge University Press 1992) was a pioneering study of the anxieties and instabilities of Romantic representations of the 'Orient' in the writings of Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, Southey, Moore and others. In 1997 he edited Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria for Everyman with a new introduction, text and notes.
His monograph Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: 'From an Antique Land' (Oxford University Press, 2002) is the first study of its kind to explore the Romantic obsession with the 'antique lands' of Ethiopia, Egypt, India and Mexico from a post-colonial perspective, drawing on a wide range of 18th and 19th century travel books, as well as recent scholarship in literature, history, geography and anthropology. He edited an anthology of Romantic Period Travel Narratives of Spanish America and the Caribbean, volume 7 of Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770-1835 (Pickering and Chatto, 2001).
He has recently co-edited (with David Simpson and Peter De Bolla) a collection of essays dedicated to John Barrell entitled Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Palgrave 2004) and is currently preparing (with Phil Connell) another co-edited volume entitled British Romanticism and Popular Culture. His current research project is a study of Robert Burns and British Romanticism, and (more generally) Anglo-Scottish literary relations in the late 18th century, but he continues to be interested in colonial themes in 18th and 19th century literature. In addition to Cambridge, he has held teaching appointments at the University of Bologna, Italy, and UNAM, Mexico City, and has lectured widely in Europe, the Americas, and India. He is convener of the new Enlightenment, Romanticism and Nations M.Litt.