Timothy Anderson

I'm a scholar of nineteenth-century poetry. My research looks broadly at the ways that German-language culture permeated and changed literary creativity in English. My current project, funded by the British Academy and UEA, is a history of alliteration in the long nineteenth century. It asks how alliteration has become associated with both innovative and conservative strands in poetic history since the nineteenth century: how alliteration has served to protest as well as preserve social norms. It examines cultural history as well as poetry for answers, uncovering how alliteration figured in the Elocutionary Movement, Anglo-Saxon purism, medicine, and the reception of germanophone verse.

My PhD research was about the reception of Richard Wagner's operas in Britain and North America — especially the ways that Wagner appealed to decadents, socialists, and Black liberationists. I've adapted this for publication as a monograph, and the manuscript is currently under review. Extracts have appeared in Textual Practice and MLQ.

Other areas of expertise and interest include: W. E. B. Du Bois, Vernon Lee, W. B. Yeats, translation and postcolonial studies, and critical theory.

I studied Philosophy and English Literature at UEA before taking an MPhil and a PhD in English Studies at the University of Cambridge. In 2019-20, I was a Baden-Württemberg Scholar at Heidelberg University. I've also worked in primary and secondary schools.