Rhian Williams, BA, MA, PhD
Room: 104, 5 University Gardens
Telephone: 0141 330 1897
e-mail: r.williams@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
Rhian Williams is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. She studied at the University of Bristol and received her doctorate from the University of Birmingham. Before joining the University of Glasgow in 2009 she taught at the University of Warwick and then at De Montfort University, where she was the post-doctoral research fellow on the AHRC-funded “The Brownings Correspondence Project”.
Her research is focussed on uses of genre, form, and prosody, especially in the Romantic and Victorian periods, but more broadly in Anglophone poetry, as explored in her book, The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry (Continuum, 2009). Her other significant research area is ecological writing and she has recently become the co-investigator on an AHRC-funded network, 'Values of Environmental Writing' with colleagues in English Literature and in Geographical and Earth Sciences. She has specific interests in the politics of poetry reading, including its ecological potential; nineteenth-century poetry and theatre; the Brownings, including their poetry and their letters; Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century reception; the cultural significance of prosody, and editing nineteenth-century writing. She has published articles on Tennyson, “Michael Field”, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wordsworth, and William Cowper. She also has a particular interest in research-led pedagogy, which informs several publications related to teaching and study.
Rhian Williams is the editor of the newsletter for the British Association for Victorian Studies (www.bavsuk.org) and Honorary Secretary to the Browning Society (www.browningsociety.org). Recently she has developed her interest in ecological writing through developing the senior honours topic module 'Romantic Ecologies' (with Dr. Alex Benchimol) and through several publications. Her next research project, provisionally titled Incarnational Poetics, considers the history of close-reading poetry and, by extension, relationships between the material and the aesthetic. This is part of Continuum Press's 'New Directions' series. Current doctoral students are working on Victorian responses to Ancient Rome, and on the twentieth-century poet, C. H. Sisson (co-supervised with Michael Schmidt).