James Wood

I joined UEA in 2014, having spent a year as an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. I completed my PhD at Stanford University and I did my BA, BA (Hons), and MA at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. 

My book Anecdotes of Enlightenment from Locke to Wordsworth (The University of Virginia Press, 2018) studies the role anecdotes play in eighteenth-century and romantic literature and philosophy. I'm also editing the works of the Norfolk clergyman Jermyn Pratt for the Norfolk Record Society. My current research concerns the relationship between intellectual and manaul labour. My work appears in the journals Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, and the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

I work on eighteenth-century and romantic literature, with a focus on the connections between literature and sociability. I am interested in how literary forms represent social life and in how literary forms themselves become agents in social interaction.

My first book Anecdotes of Enlightenment explores the role conversational anecdotes play in the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment. My second book explores how eighteenth-century writers conceptualized mental labour as manual labour. 

Other interests of mine include moral philosophy, travel literature, and genre theory. I would welcome proposals for PhD dissertations on any aspect of the "long" eighteenth-century. 

Reading Texts I

Reading Texts II

Eighteenth-Century Writing

Eighteenth-Century Voyage Literature

Eighteenth-Century Literature, Romantic Literature, Narrative Theory, Intellectual History, Essays, The Novel, Poetry, Theories of Labour, Archives, Ecocriticism