Timothy Milnes

Professor of Romantic Literature and Philosophy

Background

Tim Milnes obtained his MA in English and Philosophy from St Andrews University (1992) and his DPhil from St Hugh's College, Oxford (1997). While still a doctoral student he was a Lecturer in English at Christ Church University College, Canterbury (1995-98). Before joining the Dept. of English Literature at Edinburgh in 2001, he was Junior Research Fellow and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College, Oxford (1998-2001). Tim has published widely on the literature and philosophy of Romanticism and of the 'long' eighteenth century. He is the author of The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt (Oxford UP, 2019), The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (Cambridge UP, 2010), Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and William Wordsworth: The Prelude (Palgrave, 2009). He is the co-editor, with Kerry Sinanan, of Romanticism, Sincerity, and Authenticity (Palgrave, 2010) and he has published many articles on a range of writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jeremy Bentham, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb.

Postgraduate teaching

Programme Director, MSc in Literature and Modernity 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Research summary

Tim welcomes research proposals at MScR or PhD level on any aspect of romantic literature and culture, as well as projects on the 'long' eighteenth century, particularly those pursuing an interdisciplinary approach.

He has supervised PhD and MScR projects on topics such as Byron and the book trade, Wordsworth and education, Romanticism and genre, Shelley and empathy, the Lyrical Ballads and the German tour of 1798-99, Romantic confessional literature, Romantic concepts of space and performativity, and the idea of China in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literature.

Current research interests

Tim is currently researching the relationship between Romanticism and ideas of waste.