Jonathan Perris

jonathan perris
DPhil Candidate
Oriel College

Thesis title: Romantic Nationalism and the Metaphor of Infectious Disease

 

Doctoral project:

The thesis identifies and tracks, across the Romantic period, metaphors of the British body politic as being, in some sense, contaminated by contact with the wider world (most consequentially, India, France, and Ireland). Bringing together textual readings and archival research to construct a literary, cultural, political and intellectual history of these representations, I trace their lineage within a context of rapidly changing medico-literary understandings of human physiology, epidemiology, sensibility, associationism, and sensationalism (most consequentially, within the politico-aesthetic frameworks of Edmund Burke and the legacies of Burkean rhetorical frameworks across the period). 

 

The argument of the thesis is that many of the figures central to the origins of Romantic nationalism in Britain came to conceptualise and rhetorically frame the concepts of nation and national boundaries not only through the language but also the conceptual functioning of epidemiology and human physiology. In turn, many of the roots of Romantic nationalism are reliant on a broad, but uneven, medical and philosophical move toward a conceptualisation of the human body (and so the body politic) as a bounded container in constant epidemiological jeopardy. 

 

I read a number of texts – Burke, Burney, Wollstonecraft, Thelwell, Barbauld, Equiano, Blake, radical pamphleteers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Southey, the Tory periodical press, Meadows Taylor – to show that these literary and political frameworks of infectious disease allowed for conceptual constructions that situated the nation in constant interrelation with the outside world. These rhetorical figures – here identified as contamination, containment, and prophylaxis – provided, for a number of writers, protean frameworks that bound together the seemingly opposed concerns of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, similitude and otherness, reformism and conservatism, moral particularism and universal nature law, internally constituted and exteriorly altered form. 

 

In particular, sensationalised and aestheticised representations of foreign contamination and prophylaxis became an important mediating category through which mutually constitutive categories of class-based, national and physiological difference came to be conceptualised, represented, assimilated, remediated (at turns, resisted), and thereby popularly sensationalised and politically employed. These are – so I argue – an important tributary of juridical–imperial and paternalist conceptions of empire, as well as the notion of nation as an aesthetic object, each of which would course through much of the high nationalism and imperialism of the subsequent century. The project is funded by a GTR scholarship. 

 

Supervisor: Dr Timothy Michael

 

Research interests:

My research is broadly interdisciplinary and sits across the literature, cultural history and intellectual history of the long eighteenth century. I am particularly focused on British Romanticism and Romantic-period literature; British nationalism and transnationalism; imperialism, the British Empire, and the transatlantic slave trade; the cosmopolitan, metropolitan and radical cultures of London; political rhetoric, satire and panegyric; medical humanities; Enlightenment philosophy. I also have an abiding interest in literary and cultural theory. 

 

Publications:  

  • Jonathan Perris (2024), ‘“THUGGEE IN LONDON!”: Metropolitan Sensationalism and the Invention of the Thug’ (Victorian Literature and Culture, 2025, forthcoming). 
  • Jonathan Perris (2023), ‘God Lives in the Sun: The Critique of Evangelical Abolitionism in William Blake's “The Little Black Boy”,’ European Romantic Review, 34:6, 629-645, DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2023.2272890 
  • Jonathan Perris (2019), ‘Whirlwinds of Empire: Subversion and the Gothic in William Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth,’ Vides, 225-238. 

 

Conference Papers:

  • The Pathology of Burke’s “Two Great Evils”, BSECS International Conference 2025 (won a BSECS Bursary Award) 

 

Teaching:

I am the tutor at Oriel College for English from 1700 to 1850, where I develop the syllabi and offer a variety of classes and tutorials for FHS Paper 4 (1660–1760), FHS Paper 5 (1760–1830), and Prelims 3 (1830–1910). 

I am also a tutor at the Middlebury-CMRS Oxford Humanities Program, where I supervise undergraduate dissertations.

 

Editorial work

I have undertaken editorial and peer-review work for a number of publishers: Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Encyclopedia Britannica, Routledge, The Open University, HarperCollins, Taylor and Francis, Hodder, Newgen Publishing, Collins; and I served as Editor-in-Chief for the interdisciplinary journal, Vides, published by Oxford.

 

Outreach and other work

I have worked with international educational publishers on a variety of projects, including textbooks, language acquisition apps, curriculums, and assessment frameworks (including project managing PISA with the OECD).

 

Teaching and invited talks:

  • Orientalism and its Literary Lives (Public Lecture, Hilary 2024)
  • The World in a Book: Eighteenth-century Travel Literature (Seminar, Hilary 2023)
  • Travel and Satire in the Eighteenth Century (Tutorials, Hilary 2023)
  • Britishness and Colonialism (Tutorials, Hilary 2023)
  • Satire and Society in the Eighteenth-Century (Seminar, Hilary 2023)
  • Satire and Gender (Tutorial, Hilary 2023)
  • Satire and Commercialism (Tutorials, Hilary 2023)
  • Paradise Lost (Reading Group, Hilary 2023)
  • William Blake (Reading Group, Trinity 2023)
  • The Rise of the Novel (Tutorials, Trinity 2023)
  • Aesthetics and the Imagination (Seminar, Trinity 2023)
  • The Gothic Sublime (Tutorials, Trinity 2023)
  • Nature and the Romantics (Tutorials, Trinity 2023)
  • Orientalism (Seminar, Trinity 2023)
  • Romantic Orientalism (Tutorials, Trinity 2023)
  • The East in Novel and Theatre (Tutorials, Trinity 2023)
  • The Transatlantic Slave Trade (Seminar, Trinity 2023)
  • Slavery and Poetry (Tutorials, Trinity, 2023)
  • Narratives of Enslavement (Tutorials, Trinity 2023)
  • Liberty and Revolution (Seminar, Trinity 2023)
  • Proto-feminisms (Tutorials, Trinity 2023)
  • The French Revolution (Tutorials, Trinity 2023)
  • Slavery and its Genres (Tutorials, Michaelmas 2023)
  • Writing Workshops (Michaelmas 2023)
  • Fact and Fiction in Eighteenth-century Travel Writing (Seminar, Hilary 2024)
  • Travel and Satire (Tutorials, Hilary 2024)
  • Nationhood and Colonial Ambition (Tutorials, Hilary 2024)
  • The Mock-Epic (Seminar, Hilary 2024)
  • Gender Hierarchies (Tutorials, Hilary 2024)
  • Economic Hierarchies (Tutorials, Hilary 2024)
  • The Sentimental Novel (Tutorial, Trinity 2024)
  • Aesthetics and Poetics (Seminar, Trinity 2024)
  • Romantic Modes and Forms (Tutorials, Trinity 2024) 
  • The Gothic (Seminar, Trinity 2024)
  • Horror and Terror (Tutorials, Trinity 2024)
  • Gothic Satire (Tutorials, Trinity 2024)
  • Empire and Genre (Seminar, Trinity 2024)
  • Sentimentalism and Slavery (Tutorials, Trinity 2024)
  • Romantic Orientalism (Tutorials, Trinity 2024)
  • Liberty, Revolution and Romanticism (Seminar, Trinity 2024)
  • Proto-feminisms (Tutorial, Trinity 2023 and 2024)
  • Revolution and War (Tutorial, Trinity 2024)
  • Slavery and its Genres (Tutorials, Trinity, 2024)