Timothy Anderson

My office hours in 2025-26 are 12-1 on Wednesdays, but send me an email if that doesn't work for you. You can find me to the right of the AHB main entrance in 0.32.

I'm a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow here at UEA, where I work on nineteenth-century poetry. My current project 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. Poets of interest include William Barnes, E. J. Pfeiffer, Eliza Keary, W. E. Henley and Mathilde Blind alongside more familiar alliterators like G. M. Hopkins and A. C. Swinburne. 

The alliteration project is part of a wider interest in the ways that German-language culture permeated and changed poetic and philosophical writing in English. My PhD research was about the reception of Richard Wagner's operas in Britain and North America from 1872-1918 — 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.

In 2025-26, I will be teaching on the modules 'English Literature: Beginnings' and 'Romantic Transformations', as well as supervising dissertations up to MA level. Before coming to UEA, I taught various papers and supervised dissertations at the University of Cambridge.

I studied Philosophy and English Literature at UEA before taking an MPhil and 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.

I play football for a Sunday team in Norwich — something which is (for now) totally severed from my research and working life, but about which I'd like to write one day.