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Professor David Duff, BA, DPhil (York), FEA

David

Professor of Romanticism

Email: d.duff@qmul.ac.uk
Website: http://londonparisromantic.com/

Profile

I joined Queen Mary as Professor of Romanticism in 2016, having previously taught at the University of Aberdeen. I grew up in Nottingham and studied in York for my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. After completing my doctorate, I taught English and American literature at the Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun, in Poland, and was then British Council lecturer at the University of Gdansk for two years. I have also held visiting positions at the College of William and Mary in the USA and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. 

I retain close links with Europe and am co-founder and London director of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar, an international research forum involving other colleges of the University of London and a number of French institutions. It organises monthly seminars in London as well as hosting a biennial symposium in Paris. I am also co-founder and co-director of the International Summer School of Romanticism, launched in 2022 with colleagues from Prague, Oxford, London, Munich and Ghent. This introduces graduate students from across Europe and beyond to recent developments in Romantic studies. 

I am interested in all aspects of Romanticism, including its international dimension. My other main research interest is the history and theory of genres, and literary theory more generally. 

I take an active part in professional life and am currently President of the English Association as well as an elected Fellow and former Chair of the Board of Trustees. I previously served as Chair of the Council for College and University English (now University English) and of the Common English Forum.  

I am Co-Director of Recruitment Strategy in the School of Arts, with shared responsibility for all aspects of student recruitment. 

Teaching

Much of my teaching is the area of Romanticism but I also teach earlier and later periods and enjoy teaching modules which trace the development of a genre or theme over large stretches of time. Another focus of my teaching is literary theory, both its modern and earlier forms.  

Research

Research Interests:

  • Romanticism 
  • Shelley and his circle 
  • The 1790s 
  • Genres and genre theory 
  • Printed ephemera 
  • History of the book 

Recent and Ongoing Research 

My main current project is about the literary history of the prospectus, a type of printed advertisement used to announce forthcoming or projected books and periodicals (as well as institutions and other ventures). I am researching both actual prospectuses and artistic transformations of the genre such as Wordsworth’s ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse and Blake’s ‘Public Address’. The theoretical ramifications of the ‘book-to-come’ motif is another strand of the inquiry. This is the first-ever study of a largely forgotten genre which was a very familiar part of the Romantic book world and has deep affinities with Romantic poetics. I have published various articles and chapters on this research and am now completing a monograph.  

This research is part of a broader interest in the history of literary forms and theories of genre. My other publications in this area include Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (2009), which won the ESSE Book Award for Literatures in the English Language, and a widely used anthology, Modern Genre Theory (2000). I have also published essays on individual theorists such as Tynianov, Bakhtin, Kristeva and Bloom, and on the nascent field of cognitive poetics. 

My first book, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (1994), centred on Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna and the cult of chivalry in the Hunt-Shelley circle. I have since published other work on Shelley, especially his early poetry and his engagements with the ode and other lyric forms. I have written, too, on questions of form and genre in other Romantic poets and prose-writers, including Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Hazlitt and Lamb. 

Another continuing research interest is the literary impact of the French Revolution. In addition to my work on revolutionary romance, my contributions to this field include a comparative study of Burke and Paine, an article on Wordsworth’s unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, research on the role of the prospectus in the 1790s pamphlet war and a synoptic essay on the French Revolution in an edited volume on The Nation in British Literature and Culture (2023). 

Some of my recent work has involved collaboration with international colleagues. Since 2017, I have co-edited four special issues of Litteraria Pragensia based on the Paris symposia of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar, a special issue of European Romantic Review (2025) originating in a conference in Ascona on British Romanticism and Europe and a special issue of Romanticism (2025) on Romanticism at the Royal Institution.  

Most of these collaborative publications are available open access via the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar website. They include a number of ‘roundtables’, a publishing format which makes my dialogues with international colleagues explicit. Roundtable topics have included the ‘French’ books of The Prelude (2017) Romanticism and Periodization (2021) and Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (2025).  

As well as promoting European contexts and interdisciplinary themes, I have contributed to the development of a ‘Four Nations’ approach to British Romanticism, first with my co-edited collection Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007) and, more recently, with my edited volume The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (2018), which offers unprecedented coverage of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish Romanticism. I am currently editing The Oxford Anthology of Romanticism, which, like my Handbook, highlights different national traditions within British Romanticism while also setting these against broader international currents.  

Publications

Books 

 Journal Special Issues 

  • Romantic Shock and Surprise, ed. David Duff and Laurent Folliot, special issue of Litteraria Pragensia, 36.70 (2025), 1-143. Open Access  
  • Oaths, Odes and Orations, ed. David Duff and Marc Porée, special issue of Litteraria Pragensia, 35.69 (2024), 1-169. Open Access 
  • Wordsworth and France, ed. David Duff, Marc Porée and Martin Procházka, special issue of Litteraria Pragensia 54 (2017). Open Access 

Selected Articles and Book Chapters 

  • ‘Blake’s Public Addresses’, in Oaths, Odes and Orations, ed. David Duff and Marc Porée, special issue of Litteraria Pragensia, 35.69 (2024), 131-50. Open Access  
  • ‘The French Revolution’, in The Nation in British Literature and Culture, ed. Andrew Murphy (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 174-90. 
  • ‘Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable’ (with Nicholas Halmi, Fiona Stafford, Martin Procházka and Laurent Folliot), in Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities, ed. Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron (Open Book Publishers, 2021), 227-72. Open Access 
  • ‘Harps, Heroes and Yelling Vampires: The 1810 Poetry Collections’, in The Neglected Shelley, ed. Alan Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Ashgate, 2015; Routledge, 2019), 51-76. 
  • ‘Preludes to Knowledge: The Poetics of the Encyclopaedia Prospectus’, in Romanticism and Knowledge, ed. Felicitas Meifert-Menhard, Stefanie Fricke and Katharina Pink (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015), 189-200. 
  • ‘Hamlet and the Romantic Critical Tradition’, Nuovi Quaderni del CRIER, Anno X - 2013, Il Romanticismo Oggi (Fiorini, 2014), 13-32. 
  • ‘Intimations of Informality: Ode and the Essay Form’, in Informal Romanticism, ed. James Vigus, Studien zur Englischen Romantik (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012), 145-59. 
  • ‘Burke and Paine: Contrasts’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Writing of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 47-70. 
  • ‘“The Casket of My Unknown Mind”: The 1813 Volume of Minor Poems’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Ashgate, 2009; Routledge, 2019), 41-67. 
  • ‘The Ode and Its Afterlife’, in Paradoksy humanistyki: Ksiaga pamiatkowa ku czci Profesora Andrzeja Zgorzelskiego, ed. Ola Kubinska and David Malcolm (University of Gdansk Press, 2001), 103-14. 

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.

Public Engagement

As President and former Chair of the English Association, I have campaigned for greater public recognition of the value of English. My public statements include an open letter in the Daily Mail under the title ‘We can be a science and an arts superpower’. 

In April 2022, I gave a talk on ‘De Quincey’s Confessions and Romantic Literature’ at the Royal College of Psychiatrists Faculty of Addictions conference, as part a panel celebrating the bicentenary of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. 

In February 2017, I was Guest of Honour at the Birthday Celebration Luncheon of The Charles Lamb Society and gave a lecture in the Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury on the subject ‘Charles Lamb and the Twilight Zone’.  

In January 2017, I delivered the ‘Immortal Memory’ address at the Annual Festival Dinner of The Burns Club of London, speaking about the history of the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’. As part of it, I organised a live performance by singers Isla Sinclair and George Staines, accompanied by my daughter Koshka, an accomplished pianist (and philosopher). This included a ballad version of the song that had probably not been heard for 200 years. There is a recording on my talk and the musical performance on YouTube. 

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