Jonathan Perris

Thesis title: Sensational Contamination: Medico-literary Culture and Romantic National Boundaries

Supervisor: Dr Timothy Michael

Doctoral project:

The thesis identifies and tracks the literary and political circulation of the trope of “sensational contamination” across the Romantic period – that is, 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 a lineage of the trope as it began to develop and change alongside contemporary medico-literary understandings of human physiology, epidemiology, sensibility, and philosophical sensationalism (most importantly, the politico-aesthetic frameworks of Edmund Burke). 

I argue that the language, conceptual functioning, and rhetorical constructions associated with epidemiology and human physiology became, for the cosmopolitan middle classes of London, an important mediating category through which mutually constitutive categories of class-based and national difference were conceptualized, represented, assimilated, remediated, and thereby popularly sensationalised and politically employed. I read a number of Romantic-period authors and orators to argue that these discursive frameworks began to coalesce around a number of consequential conceptualisations of imperial difference and British national boundaries (nationalisms, imperialisms, but also cosmopolitanisms). The project is funded by a GTR scholarship.

Research interests:

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

Teaching:

I am the tutor at Oriel College for English from 1700 to 1850, where I develop the syllabi and offer a variety of lectures, classes and tutorials for undergraduate 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.

Publications:  

• Jonathan Perris (2024), ‘“THUGGEE IN LONDON!”: Medico-literary Culture and the Invention of the Thug’ (in revisions).

• 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. 

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:

• The Spectacular Pathology of Burke’s “Two Great Evils” (Conference Paper)
• God Lives in the Sun: Blake and Equiano (Conference Paper)
• 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) (Reading Group, Hilary 2023)
• William Blake (Reading Group, Trinity 2023) (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)