William Christie

A graduate of the universities of Sydney and Oxford, Emeritus Professor William (Will) Christie was Head of the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU from 2015 to 2021 and, before that, Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney. He was founding President of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA) from 2010 to 2015 and his scholarly work in Romantic studies has been widely published in English Literary History, Romanticism, Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, and other journals specialising in British and Romantic literature. His monograph, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (2006), was awarded the NSW Premier’s Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2008 and his other publications include The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (2008), The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx (2009), Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life (2014), and The Two Romanticisms, and Other Essays (2016). With the aid of Discovery Project grants from the Australian Research Council, he is currently researching (1) a critical biography of the Scottish critic, politician, and judge, Francis Jeffrey, editor of the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh Review; (2) a major study of public lecturing in the Romantic period; and, most recently, (3) ‘The Emotional Register of Liberal Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century’, along with Jock Macleod and Peter Denney, with whom he has edited a volume of critical essays, Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals (2020).

Professor Christie was Director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Researchers and Centres (ACHRC) from 2017 to 2021 and is currently co-ordinator of the Romanticism Section of the International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE), on the International Advisory Board of the journal European Romantic Review, and general editor of the series China and the West in the Modern World for Sydney University Press. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2011.

For many years president of the Dylan Thomas Society of Australia and an active member of a number of literary societies, William Christie is also the author of Under Mulga Wood (2004), an award-winning 'play for voices' that has enjoyed performances around Australia and been broadcast and recorded by the ABC.