Professor Matthew Sangster

  • Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History (English Literature)

telephone: 6369
email: Matthew.Sangster@glasgow.ac.uk

R501, Level 5, 2 The Square, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ

Import to contacts

ORCID iDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813

Biography

I joined the University of Glasgow in September 2016 from a previous post at the University of Birmingham; I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020 and Professor in 2022.  I completed my BA at the University of Cambridge, my MA at King’s College London and my PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London.  Between 2008 and 2014, I worked at the British Library, cataloguing the archive of the Royal Literary Fund and contributing to exhibitions - I helped to research Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands in 2012 and co-curated (with Zoë Wilcox) The Worlds of Mervyn Peake in 2011.  In 2013, I held a Fleeman Fellowship at the University of St Andrews and in 2015, I took up a Charles J. Cole Fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale.

My doctorate examined literary careers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the principal modes for achieving success as an author at this time were social, rather than professional, commercial or aesthetic.  My work explored the meagre financial rewards offered by the publishing industry; the Royal Literary Fund and its struggling applicants; the contexts that allowed Robert Southey, Thomas Moore and Walter Scott to prosper by writing; the kinds of authority propagated by the powerful quarterly Reviews; and the crucial roles played by affiliation and networking in ensuring literary success.  A heavily revised version was published as Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (Palgrave, 2021) and was shortlisted for the SHARP Book Prize and the Marilyn Gaull Book Award.

I have a keen interest in fantasy and science fiction, having published on Mervyn Peake, China Miéville and fantastic cities.  I co-direct Glasgow's Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and am a founding co-editor (with Brian Attebery and Dimitra Fimi) of the Bloomsbury Perspectives on Fantasy series.  My monograph An Introduction to Fantasy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) won the 2024 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies.  I was co-curator of the British Library's major exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination (2023-24) and co-edited the exhibition companion volume.  I teach on Glasgow's Fantasy MLitt and I supervise extensively in this field.

I also work in the Digital Humanities.  My catalogue of the Archive of the Royal Literary Fund, a charitable organisation set up in 1790 to provide confidential financial aid to struggling writers, consists of over 78,000 records covering applications from more than 3600 authors who first applied to the Fund between 1790 and 1939, as well as entries for minute books, annual reports and administrative papers.  An index to the RLF case files based on the catalogue can be found here.  I have an ongoing digital project that examines the ways in which Romantic-period London was represented across a wide range of genres through juxtaposing different kinds of maps, images and accounts.  I have published several journal articles and book chapters drawing on this research.

I have a keen interest in how digital technologies can help us to recover the hidden histories of reading, with a particular focus on the potential of historic library borrowing records.  I completed a pilot project on the University of Glasgow's eighteenth-century borrowing registers and collaborated with Professor Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool) and Professor Katie Halsey (University of Stirling) on two connected AHRC-funded projects examining transatlantic subscription libraries and book-borrowing in Scotland.  I am currently working with Katie and Mark on a monograph and an edited collection arising from this research.

I have a longstanding interest in literary institutions (particularly libraries and universities).  I led the AHRC-funded ‘Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900’ research network alongside Professor Jon Mee (University of York); this resulted in an edited collection (Cambridge University Press, 2022).  We built on this work through a Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded network on 'The Media Revolution of the 1820s', which led to the collection Remediating the 1820s (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).   I have published related research on literary institutions in London, the university library at St Andrews and the library of William Hunter. 

I have served on the Executive of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) since 2009 in a wide range of roles.  Currently, I am the association’s President.  I chaired BARS' 2021 International Conference, Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections, and its 2024 International Conference, Romantic Making and Unmaking, which was held in Glasgow.  I was previously a co-editor of the open access journal Romanticism on the Net (2017-25) and technical editor for The BARS Review (2013-24).

Research interests

Research Interests

  • Eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature
  • Fantasy
  • Authorship
  • Archives and manuscripts
  • Book History, particularly publishing and library history
  • Material culture
  • Institutional histories and practices
  • Representations of London
  • Digital Humanities
  • Genre
  • Contemporary narrative media
  • Music and digital culture

 

Publications

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011
Number of items: 52.

2024

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2024) The A to Z of Regency London 1819. London Journal, (doi: 10.1080/03058034.2024.2332144)[Book Review] (Early Online Publication)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2024) Metropolitanism. In: Morrison, Robert (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 177-194. ISBN 9780198834540 (doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198834540.013.25)

Halsey, Katie, Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Aitken, Brian, Baston, Karen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7116-5457, Branagh-Miscampbell, Maxine, Macfarlane, Isla, Smith, Josh and O'Callaghan Yeoman, Cleo (2024) Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers' Registers. [Website]

2023

Kirk, Tanya and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (Eds.) (2023) Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy. British Library Publishing: London. ISBN 9780712354493

Kirk, Tanya and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Editors’ introduction. In: Kirk, Tanya and Sangster, Matthew (eds.) Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy. British Library Publishing: London, pp. 12-21. ISBN 9780712354493

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Fantasy’s weird architectures. In: Kirk, Tanya and Sangster, Matthew (eds.) Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy. British Library Publishing: London, pp. 150-168. ISBN 9780712354493

Kirk, Tanya, Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Foss, Rachel, Reed, Susan and Gosling, Sophie (2023) Fantasy: Realms of Imagination. [Exhibitions]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) An Introduction to Fantasy. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. ISBN 9781009429948 (doi: 10.1017/9781009429924)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Charles Lamb’s canny career choices. Charles Lamb Bulletin, 177, pp. 42-55.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Urban sublimes. In: Duffy, Cian (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 104-116. ISBN 9781316515914 (doi: 10.1017/9781009026963.011)

Davis, Amanda Blake and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) “Load every rift”: power, opposition, and community in Romantic poetry and heavy metal. European Romantic Review, 34(3), pp. 291-302. (doi: 10.1080/10509585.2023.2205079)

Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (Eds.) (2023) Remediating the 1820s. Series: Edinburgh critical studies in romanticism. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN 9781474493277

Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Introduction. In: Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew (eds.) Remediating the 1820s. Series: Edinburgh critical studies in romanticism. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, pp. 1-20. ISBN 9781474493277

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (Ed.) (2023) David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism. Series: Romantic circles praxis. Romantic Circles.

de Groote, Brecht, Fulford, Tim and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Editors' Introduction: De Quincey's Confessions at 200. Coleridge Bulletin, 62,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) “I can’t give everything away”: David Bowie and Post-Romantic artistic identity. In: Sangster, Matthew (ed.) David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism. Series: Romantic circles praxis. Romantic Circles.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Introduction: David Bowie and Romanticism’s wild mutations. In: Sangster, Matthew (ed.) David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism. Series: Romantic circles praxis. Romantic Circles.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 by Sean D. Moore. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 57(1), pp. 127-129. (doi: 10.1353/ecs.2023.a909462)[Book Review]

2022

Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (Eds.) (2022) Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. ISBN 9781108830201

Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2022) Introduction: literature and institutions. In: Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew (eds.) Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 1-23. ISBN 9781108830201 (doi: 10.1017/9781108909501.001)

Baston, Karen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7116-5457 and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2022) 'D -- d Good': Glasgow University Library Books and their Borrowers in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond. Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow, Glasgow, UK, 07 Apr 2022.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2022) Plate 2.25: Palace of Placentia. Vetusta Monumenta: Ancient Monuments, a Digital Edition,

2021

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Baston, Karen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7116-5457 and Aitken, Brian (2021) Reconstructing student reading habits in eighteenth-century Glasgow: enlightenment systems and digital reconfigurations. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 54(4), pp. 935-955. (doi: 10.1353/ecs.2021.0098)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2021) Living as an Author in the Romantic Period. Series: Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism and cultures of print. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783030370466 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-37047-3)

2020

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2020) Holism and division in dreams of the metropolis. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 31(3), pp. 424-448.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2020) The Romantic Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution by Ian Newman. Keats-Shelley Journal, 69, pp. 174-175. [Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Baston, Karen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7116-5457 and Aitken, Brian (2020) Eighteenth-Century Borrowing from the University of Glasgow. [Website]

2019

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2019) The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth‐Century Home. By Abigail Williams. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. 2017. x + 351 p. 57 b. and w. illus. £30 (hb). ISBN 978‐0‐300‐20829‐0. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42(2), pp. 255-256. (doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12609)[Book Review]

2018

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2018) Conceptions of knowledge in William Hunter's library. In: Campbell, Mungo, Flis, Nathan and Sánchez-Jáuregui, María Dolores (eds.) William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum. Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut. ISBN 9780300236651

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2018) The 1820s: Innovation and Diffusion. [Website]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2018) Kevin Gilmartin (ed.), Sociable Places: Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain. Review of English Studies, 69(290), pp. 589-592. (doi: 10.1093/res/hgx121)[Book Review]

2017

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Copyright literature and reading communities in eighteenth-century St Andrews. Review of English Studies, 68(287), pp. 945-967. (doi: 10.1093/res/hgx024)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Coherence and inclusion in the Life-Writing of Romantic-period London. Life Writing, 14(2), pp. 141-153. (doi: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291246)

Fulford, Tim and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Introduction – Southeyan correspondences. Romanticism on the Net, 68-69,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Southey versus London: proto-romantic disaffection and dehumanisation in the British metropolis. Romanticism on the Net, 68-69,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Mee, Jon and Buckley, Jenny (2017) Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900. [Website]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Accumulating London. Picturing Places,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Publishing, Editing, and Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman. Keats-Shelley Review, 31(1), pp. 100-102. (doi: 10.1080/09524142.2017.1297099)[Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Transformation and specialization in London and its topography. Journal of Victorian Culture, 22(3), pp. 317-328. (doi: 10.1080/13555502.2017.1329971)

2016

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2016) John Keats and urban time. Keats Letters Project, 1 Nov.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2016) Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 2: English and British Fiction 1750-1820. Library: Transactions of The Bibliographical Society, 17(2), pp. 194-197. (doi: 10.1093/library/17.2.194)[Book Review]

2015

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2015) Romantic London. [Website]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2015) British institutions, literary production and national glory in the Romantic Period. Poetica, 82, pp. 39-57.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2015) Iron council, Bas-Lag and generic expectations. In: Edwards, Caroline and Venezia, Tony (eds.) China Miéville: Critical Essays. Series: Contemporary writers, critical essays (3). Gylphi: Canterbury, UK, pp. 185-212. ISBN 9781780240275

2014

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2014) Catalogue of the Archive of the Royal Literary Fund. Catalogue. British Library, London.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2014) David Stewart, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture, and Kim Wheatley, Romantic Feuds. BARS Review, 44, [Book Review]

2013

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2013) Adapting to dissect: rhetoric and representation in the quarterly reviews in the Romantic period. In: Duffy, Cian, Howell, Peter and Ruddell, Caroline (eds.) Romantic Adaptations: Essays in Mediation and Remediation. Ashgate: Farnham, Surrey, pp. 57-72. ISBN 9781472414106

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2013) Peake and Vulnerability. In: Winnington, G. Peter (ed.) Miracle Enough: Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. 105-116. ISBN 9781443844116

2012

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2012) “You have not advertised out of it”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Francis Jeffrey on authorship, networks and personalities. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 61, (doi: 10.7202/1018602ar)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2012) Short forms and unalloyed genre. Dandelion, 3(1), 62.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2012) Susan Matoff, Conflicted Life: William Jerdan, 1782-1869: London Editor, Author and Critic. BARS Review, 40, pp. 34-36. [Book Review]

2011

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 and Wilcox, Zoë (2011) The Worlds of Mervyn Peake. [Exhibitions]

This list was generated on Tue Jul 15 08:27:30 2025 BST.
Jump to: Articles | Books | Book Sections | Book Reviews | Edited Books | Research Reports or Papers | Conference or Workshop Item | Exhibitions | Website
Number of items: 52.

Articles

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Charles Lamb’s canny career choices. Charles Lamb Bulletin, 177, pp. 42-55.

Davis, Amanda Blake and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) “Load every rift”: power, opposition, and community in Romantic poetry and heavy metal. European Romantic Review, 34(3), pp. 291-302. (doi: 10.1080/10509585.2023.2205079)

de Groote, Brecht, Fulford, Tim and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Editors' Introduction: De Quincey's Confessions at 200. Coleridge Bulletin, 62,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2022) Plate 2.25: Palace of Placentia. Vetusta Monumenta: Ancient Monuments, a Digital Edition,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Baston, Karen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7116-5457 and Aitken, Brian (2021) Reconstructing student reading habits in eighteenth-century Glasgow: enlightenment systems and digital reconfigurations. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 54(4), pp. 935-955. (doi: 10.1353/ecs.2021.0098)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2020) Holism and division in dreams of the metropolis. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 31(3), pp. 424-448.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Copyright literature and reading communities in eighteenth-century St Andrews. Review of English Studies, 68(287), pp. 945-967. (doi: 10.1093/res/hgx024)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Coherence and inclusion in the Life-Writing of Romantic-period London. Life Writing, 14(2), pp. 141-153. (doi: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291246)

Fulford, Tim and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Introduction – Southeyan correspondences. Romanticism on the Net, 68-69,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Southey versus London: proto-romantic disaffection and dehumanisation in the British metropolis. Romanticism on the Net, 68-69,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Accumulating London. Picturing Places,

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Transformation and specialization in London and its topography. Journal of Victorian Culture, 22(3), pp. 317-328. (doi: 10.1080/13555502.2017.1329971)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2016) John Keats and urban time. Keats Letters Project, 1 Nov.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2015) British institutions, literary production and national glory in the Romantic Period. Poetica, 82, pp. 39-57.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2012) “You have not advertised out of it”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Francis Jeffrey on authorship, networks and personalities. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 61, (doi: 10.7202/1018602ar)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2012) Short forms and unalloyed genre. Dandelion, 3(1), 62.

Books

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) An Introduction to Fantasy. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. ISBN 9781009429948 (doi: 10.1017/9781009429924)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2021) Living as an Author in the Romantic Period. Series: Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism and cultures of print. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783030370466 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-37047-3)

Book Sections

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2024) Metropolitanism. In: Morrison, Robert (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 177-194. ISBN 9780198834540 (doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198834540.013.25)

Kirk, Tanya and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Editors’ introduction. In: Kirk, Tanya and Sangster, Matthew (eds.) Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy. British Library Publishing: London, pp. 12-21. ISBN 9780712354493

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Fantasy’s weird architectures. In: Kirk, Tanya and Sangster, Matthew (eds.) Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy. British Library Publishing: London, pp. 150-168. ISBN 9780712354493

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Urban sublimes. In: Duffy, Cian (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 104-116. ISBN 9781316515914 (doi: 10.1017/9781009026963.011)

Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Introduction. In: Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew (eds.) Remediating the 1820s. Series: Edinburgh critical studies in romanticism. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, pp. 1-20. ISBN 9781474493277

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) “I can’t give everything away”: David Bowie and Post-Romantic artistic identity. In: Sangster, Matthew (ed.) David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism. Series: Romantic circles praxis. Romantic Circles.

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Introduction: David Bowie and Romanticism’s wild mutations. In: Sangster, Matthew (ed.) David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism. Series: Romantic circles praxis. Romantic Circles.

Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2022) Introduction: literature and institutions. In: Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew (eds.) Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 1-23. ISBN 9781108830201 (doi: 10.1017/9781108909501.001)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2018) Conceptions of knowledge in William Hunter's library. In: Campbell, Mungo, Flis, Nathan and Sánchez-Jáuregui, María Dolores (eds.) William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum. Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut. ISBN 9780300236651

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2015) Iron council, Bas-Lag and generic expectations. In: Edwards, Caroline and Venezia, Tony (eds.) China Miéville: Critical Essays. Series: Contemporary writers, critical essays (3). Gylphi: Canterbury, UK, pp. 185-212. ISBN 9781780240275

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2013) Adapting to dissect: rhetoric and representation in the quarterly reviews in the Romantic period. In: Duffy, Cian, Howell, Peter and Ruddell, Caroline (eds.) Romantic Adaptations: Essays in Mediation and Remediation. Ashgate: Farnham, Surrey, pp. 57-72. ISBN 9781472414106

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2013) Peake and Vulnerability. In: Winnington, G. Peter (ed.) Miracle Enough: Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. 105-116. ISBN 9781443844116

Book Reviews

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2024) The A to Z of Regency London 1819. London Journal, (doi: 10.1080/03058034.2024.2332144)[Book Review] (Early Online Publication)

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2023) Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 by Sean D. Moore. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 57(1), pp. 127-129. (doi: 10.1353/ecs.2023.a909462)[Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2020) The Romantic Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution by Ian Newman. Keats-Shelley Journal, 69, pp. 174-175. [Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2019) The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth‐Century Home. By Abigail Williams. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. 2017. x + 351 p. 57 b. and w. illus. £30 (hb). ISBN 978‐0‐300‐20829‐0. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42(2), pp. 255-256. (doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12609)[Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2018) Kevin Gilmartin (ed.), Sociable Places: Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain. Review of English Studies, 69(290), pp. 589-592. (doi: 10.1093/res/hgx121)[Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2017) Publishing, Editing, and Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman. Keats-Shelley Review, 31(1), pp. 100-102. (doi: 10.1080/09524142.2017.1297099)[Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2016) Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 2: English and British Fiction 1750-1820. Library: Transactions of The Bibliographical Society, 17(2), pp. 194-197. (doi: 10.1093/library/17.2.194)[Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2014) David Stewart, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture, and Kim Wheatley, Romantic Feuds. BARS Review, 44, [Book Review]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2012) Susan Matoff, Conflicted Life: William Jerdan, 1782-1869: London Editor, Author and Critic. BARS Review, 40, pp. 34-36. [Book Review]

Edited Books

Kirk, Tanya and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (Eds.) (2023) Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy. British Library Publishing: London. ISBN 9780712354493

Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (Eds.) (2023) Remediating the 1820s. Series: Edinburgh critical studies in romanticism. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN 9781474493277

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (Ed.) (2023) David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism. Series: Romantic circles praxis. Romantic Circles.

Mee, Jon and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (Eds.) (2022) Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. ISBN 9781108830201

Research Reports or Papers

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2014) Catalogue of the Archive of the Royal Literary Fund. Catalogue. British Library, London.

Conference or Workshop Item

Baston, Karen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7116-5457 and Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2022) 'D -- d Good': Glasgow University Library Books and their Borrowers in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond. Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow, Glasgow, UK, 07 Apr 2022.

Exhibitions

Kirk, Tanya, Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Foss, Rachel, Reed, Susan and Gosling, Sophie (2023) Fantasy: Realms of Imagination. [Exhibitions]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 and Wilcox, Zoë (2011) The Worlds of Mervyn Peake. [Exhibitions]

Website

Halsey, Katie, Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Aitken, Brian, Baston, Karen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7116-5457, Branagh-Miscampbell, Maxine, Macfarlane, Isla, Smith, Josh and O'Callaghan Yeoman, Cleo (2024) Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers' Registers. [Website]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Baston, Karen ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7116-5457 and Aitken, Brian (2020) Eighteenth-Century Borrowing from the University of Glasgow. [Website]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2018) The 1820s: Innovation and Diffusion. [Website]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813, Mee, Jon and Buckley, Jenny (2017) Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900. [Website]

Sangster, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6452-4813 (2015) Romantic London. [Website]

This list was generated on Tue Jul 15 08:27:30 2025 BST.

Grants

May 2020-December 2024: 'Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers' (Co-Investigator) - a large-scale AHRC-funded collaboration with Katie Halsey (University of Stirling), creating and researching a digital database of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish borrowing records to provide a new qualitative and quantitative basis for considering the history of Scottish reading.

October 2019-September 2024: 'Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic' (Co-Investigator) - a large-scale AHRC-funded project led by Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool), conducting a transatlantic study of surviving subscription library records covering books, loans and subscribers.

April 2018-March 2020: 'The Media Revolution of the 1820s' (Principal Investigator) - a Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded research network assembled in collaboration with Jon Mee (University of York) to explore the importance of an understudied decade, during which the costs of printing fell dramatically, the speed of communications rose, mediating institutions expanded and new technologies of expression proliferated.

April 2018-July 2019: 'Enlightenment Readers in the Scottish Universities' (Principal Investigator) - a Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant-funded project seeking to digitise, transcribe, interpret and contextualise the University of Glasgow's surviving eighteenth-century library borrowing registers.

September 2016-December 2017: ‘Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900’ (Principal Investigator) - an AHRC-funded research network conducted in collaboration with Jon Mee.  Details of the network's workshops can be seen on the project website; a publication is forthcoming.

March-April 2015: Charles J. Cole Fellowship, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

March-June 2013: Fleeman Fellowship, School of English, University of St Andrews. (resulting publication)

I have an ongoing collaborative relationship with the Royal Literary Fund, which supported my doctorate and which has provided subsequent tranches of funding to further my explorations of the RLF archive.

I have also secured numerous smaller grants to support my digitisation work and my attendance at conferences and symposia.

Supervision

I am happy to supervise postgraduate students in any of my areas of expertise and am particularly keen to work with Romanticists, book historians and students of Fantasy.  However, I am heavily committed at the moment, so am limited in how many new students I can currently take on.  If you'd like to send me a query, it's helpful to include a CV and a draft project proposal.

I am happy to help people developing postdoctoral projects for which I would be a suitable supporter - I am currently a mentor for a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow.

I have co-supervised doctoral projects on topics including Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, Tolkien and ethics, contemporary representations of the Devil, video games in contemporary fiction, the 1820s periodical the Glasgow Looking Glass, psychology and Fantasy gaming, Tolkien's poetry, Tamora Pierce, China Miéville, Fantasy tropes, Tolkien and queerness, video games and ecology, student marginalia, Tolkien and Romanticism and improvement in early-nineteenth-century Scottish novels.  Students I supervise have secured funding from the AHRC/SGSAH and the University's LKAS scheme.

Current Students

  • Elvery, Gabriel
    Pieces of Heart: Video Games, Affect and The Digital Fantastic
  • Sherwood, Will
    “I sit beside the fire and think”: J.R.R. Tolkien, British Romanticism, and their Cultural Legacies
  • Worm, Grace Ann Thomas
    Female Fantasy: Tamora Pierce’s Influence on Contemporary Fantasy
  • Francis Butterworth-Parr, 'Machphrasis: Video Games as Metaphor in Contemporary Literary Culture' (PhD awarded 2024)
  • Emma French, 'How Do You Want to Do This?’: Dungeons & Dragons as Transformative Fantasy (PhD awarded 2024)
  • Mariana Rios Maldonado, 'Ethics and the Encounter with the Other in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth Narratives' (PhD awarded 2024)
  • Lucinda Holdsworth, 'The Use and Abuse of Lucifer in Contemporary Literary Culture' (PhD awarded 2023)
  • Danielle Schwertner, '"Nothing was further from his intention than to offend": An Analysis of Visual Satire, Identity and Stereotypes in the Glasgow/Northern Looking Glass Caricature Periodical, 1825–1826' (PhD awarded 2023)
  • Penelope Holdaway, 'An Exploration of Tolkien’s Changing Vision of Faërie through his non-Middle-earth Poetry' (PhD awarded 2021)
  • Louise Creechan, 'Unwriting Victorian Illiteracy' (PhD awarded 2020)

Teaching

I teach across the curriculum at Glasgow.  In recent years, I have led my own courses 'Fantastika Now' (Senior Honours) and 'Fantasy Across Media' (MLitt); co-taught 'The Material Lives of Texts' (MLitt) with Professor Dahlia Porter; convened 'Inventing the Modern: Literature 1660-1780' (Junior Honours); and taught on 'Literature 1780-1840' (Junior Honours).  I lecture on and lead workshops for a wide range of other courses.


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