Alexander Freer

Lecturer in Romanticism

Contact details

Address

Street

School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures
50 George Square
Edinburgh

City
Post code
EH8 9JU

Availability

  • Office Hours Semester 2 2025:
    Thursdays, 11.30-12.30, 2.01, 21 Bucchleuch Pl.
    Please email if you have accessibility needs.

Biography

Background

I studied at the universities of Warwick (BA English and Comparative Literaturs) and Cambridge (MPhil, PhD in English). Before coming to Edinburgh in 2023, I held a research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and taught at Cambridge and the University of East Anglia.

I work on Romantic period poetry and prose, and on wider questions of literary theory and history from 18thC to the present. My most recent work has focused on the Romantic lyric (Shelley, Landon, Kirke White, Wordsworth); on ethical form; and on the history and critical value of ideas including elation and gentleness.

At Edinburgh I teach a variety of courses including 'Enlightenment and Romanticism', 'Reading Theory', and 'Desire and Writing'.

Undergraduate teaching

  • Romantic literature
  • Literary criticism and theory
  • Poetry and poetics

Postgraduate teaching

  • Romantic literature
  • Literary criticism and theory

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Please feel free to contact me regarding supervision on any topics listed under my research interests. I particularly welcome theoretically-informed projects on Romantic literature, and critical projects engaging problems of ethics, phenomenology, affect, or aesthetics.

Research summary

  • Romanticism
  • Poetry and poetic form
  • Literary theory, 18th century to present
  • Economics and literature

Current research interests

Romantic period poetry and prose (at the moment especially Godwin, Wordsworth, Shelley, Landon, De Quincey, Henry Kirke White); literary theory (aesthetics; psychoanalysis; queer theory; history of sexuality; phenomenology; ethics); economics and literature (debt; forgiveness; risk, discounting).

Past research interests

My first book, Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure (OUP, 2020) argues that 'unremembered pleasure', an idea Wordsworth formulates in 'Tintern Abbey' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth's poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions.

This article was published on