Ross Wilson

I was born in Salford and brought up in Manchester, where I attended Philips High School and Bury College. I was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University College London before completing my doctorate at Cambridge in 2004. I held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel (2004-7) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of English, Cambridge (2007-9) before being appointed to a Lectureship in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 2009. I returned to Cambridge in 2013 as Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English and was a Fellow of Trinity College from 2013 until 2019, before rejoining Emmanuel, where I am a Fellow once again.

I work chiefly on the history, theory, and practice of literary criticism and on Romantic and Victorian poetry. I have just completed a project on the generic forms of literary criticism, provisionally entitled Critical Forms. My writing has appeared in New Literary History, Textual Practice, Romanticism, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, Frieze, and other venues. I have been on BBC 4 talking about Alexander Pope and the Thames, on BBC Radio 4 talking about Lord Byron as a student, and on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire regaling commuters with discussions of Lord Byron (again), literary love letters, and much else besides.

Research Interests

The history, theory, and practice of literary criticism; Romanticism; poetry in English from 1750 to the present; 'animacy' and artworks; literature and theology; literature, politics, and ethics.