Alan Richardson's Home Page

Alan Richardson

Alan Richardson
Professor, Department of English
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

(617) 552-3713 (office)
(617) 552-4220 (fax)

Alan Richardson holds degrees in English from Princeton University and Harvard University. He has published extensively on the literature and culture of the British Romantic era, especially in relation to issues of gender, childhood and education, race and colonialism, and scientific psychology. His current research involves Romantic theories and representations of subjectivity, embodied agency, and language in relation to 18th- and early 19th-century neuroscientific speculation and experimentation, and the prospects in general for work at the intersection of literary studies and the cognitive sciences. He co-founded and has co-directed both the Seminar on Romantic Literature and Culture and the Seminar on Cognitive Theory and the Arts at the Humanities Center (Harvard University) and co-organized the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) 1996 annual meeting, "Romantic Crossings". Major grants and awards include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 1997-98, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers in 1989-90, a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities for 1984-85, the Keats-Shelley Distinguished Scholar Award for 2008, a Boston College Distinguished Research Award in 2004, the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in the Humanities for 2011, and the American Conference on Romanticism (now ICR) Book Prize for 1994. He serves on the advisory boards of a number of journals and professional organizations and as general editor for the Houghton Mifflin British New Riverside series.

e-mail: alan.richardson@bc.edu

Web Sites

Literature, Cognition & the Brain

(Please note that there are no resources for maintaining the above site, which remains available for historical purposes and because some continue to find it useful).

Romantic Circles (Advisory Board and Founding Co-Editor, Features Page, now Features & Events)

Romantic Chronology (Advisory Board)

NINES: a networked interface for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship (Editorial Board for Romantic scholarship)

Research

Publications and Presentations

The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.
The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Ashgate, 2004. (Edited with Ellen Spolsky).
Early Black British Writing. A New Riverside Edition. Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Three Oriental Tales: Frances Sheridan, History of Nourjahad; William Beckford, Vathek; Lord Byron, The Giaour. A New Riverside Edition. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, vol. 4: Literary Forms: Verse. (Volume editor). Pickering & Chatto, 1999.
Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834. (Co-editor with Sonia Hofkosh). Indiana University Press, 1996.
Full list of publications
Selected and upcoming presentations

Courses

EN 351 British Romantic Poetry
EN 563 Gothic and Romantic Novel
EN 849 Romantic Texts and Contexts
EN 934 Advanced Research Colloquium
EN 657/819 Editing Anti-Slavery Poems Project
EN 902 Doctoral Seminar: The Sublime