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

  • Drop In / Office Hours 2025-26
    Semester 1: Tuesdays 12pm-1pm
    Room 2.51, 50 George Square

Biography

Background

I studied at the universities of Warwick (BA English and Comparative Literature) 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 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 literary and other kinds of form; and on the history of ideas including elation and gentleness.

Alongside working on writers and books of the Romantic period, I'm currently thinking about a number of wider questions around form:

  • What are the relations between literary and non-literary (eg. economic) forms?
  • What would it mean for form to be political? When might it become (or cease to be) political?
  • What might a history of formalization look like?

At Edinburgh I teach a variety of courses including 'Enlightenment and Romanticism', 'Reading Theory', and 'Desire and Writing'. I'm also Director of Postgraduate Research for English and Scottish Literature.

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. I particularly welcome projects on poetry and poetics; on literature of the Romantic period; on the history and theory of criticism; and interdisciplinary projects engaging with aesthetics, ethics, and the phenomenological tradition.

Research summary

  • British Romantic writing
  • Poetry and poetic form, 18th century to present
  • Literary criticism and theory, 18th century to present
  • Economics and literature

Current research interests

Romantic period poetry and prose (William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Letitia Landon, Lord Byron, William Godwin, Thomas De Quincey, Henry Kirke White, John Keats); Literary and social theory (G.W.F. Hegel, Georg Simmel, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Niklas Luhmann, Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Jean Laplanche, Leo Bersani, Anne Dufourmantelle, Fredric Jameson); contemporary debates around lyric, form, and reading (eg. Caroline Levine, Heather Love, Sharon Marcus, Virginia Jackson, Rita Felski); 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.

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