Tess Somervell

I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, working on a project titled 'Georgic Climates: Writing the Weather in Eighteenth-Century Poetry'.

My doctoral research (University of Cambridge) focused on time in three long poems of the (very) long eighteenth century: Milton’s Paradise Lost, Thomson’s The Seasons, and Wordsworth’s The Prelude. I completed it in 2015. I then taught at Cambridge and held a Visiting Fellowship at Chawton House Library before joining Leeds in 2016. As Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow I worked on the AHRC-funded project 'British Romantic Writing and Environmental Catastrophe'.

For this project, I carried out research into representations of the deluge in eighteenth-century and Romantic writing, with a particular focus on Wordsworth. I am interested in how the biblical deluge was reimagined by poets in the light of developments in geological history, ideas about nature, and theories of time.

My work on the deluge feeds into my current project Georgic Climates, which is on representations of weather and climate in georgic poetry of the long eighteenth century. I am examining how and why poets used the georgic mode and its conventions for representing the weather to navigate between competing conceptions of nature, notably the theological and the natural philosophical.