Rhian Williams

Biography

Rhian Williams is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. She studied at the University of Bristol and received her doctorate from the University of Birmingham. Before joining the University of Glasgow in 2009 she taught at the University of Warwick and then at De Montfort University, where she was the post-doctoral research fellow on the AHRC-funded “The Brownings Correspondence Project”. Dr Williams edited the newsletter, and served on the executive committee, for the British Association for Victorian Studies (www.bavsuk.org) from 2004 to 2011 and was the Honorary Secretary to the Browning Society (www.browningsociety.org) from 2009 to 2011). She has discussed poetry and poets' lives on BBC Radio and worked as an adviser on the BBC4 docu-drama, Edgar Allen Poe: Love, Death and Women, dir. Louise Lockwood, broadcast October 2011. In 2010-11, Dr Williams co-organised three major international conferences: British Association for Victorian Studies 10th Anniversary Conference, Victorian Forms & Formations, 2-4 September 2010 Contradictory Woolf: the 21st Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, 9-12 July 2011 British Association for Romantic Studies, 12th International Biennial Conference: Enlightenment, Romanticism, Nation, 28-31 July 2011

Research Interest

Dr Williams' research traces the poetics of material history by examining how prosody, form and genre emerge from and intervene in cultural, social and political contexts, particularly between 1770 and 1900, but more broadly in Anglophone poetry, as explored in her book, The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry (revised second edition, Bloomsbury 2013; third edition in progress). Her significant research interests are in ecological writing and in literature and theology. She was co-investigator on an AHRC-funded network, 'Values of Environmental Writing' with colleagues in English Literature and in Geographical and Earth Sciences and recent and forthcoming publications have focused on eco-critical readings of Romantic-period writing. She is also interested in how the materialist turn in higher criticism of the Bible shaped secular readings of poetry and has published work on Matthew Arnold's and Herman Melville's poetry in this context. Dr Williams' work - covering areas such as the politics of poetry reading, including its ecological potential; nineteenth-century poetry and theatre; the Brownings, including their poetry and their letters; Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century reception; the cultural significance of prosody, and editing nineteenth-century writing - has been widely published in journals such as Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Literature Compass, Literature and Theology, and in several essay collections. She is the co-editor of four volumes of The Brownings' Correspondence, covering the key years 1854-56 when Elizabeth Barrett Browning was finishing Aurora Leigh and Robert Browning published Men and Women. She is particularly interested in supervising work in any of her research fields, particulary eco-criticism, cultural poetics, poetry and religion, and nineteenth-century literature. Dr. Williams is currently developing new projects that seek to recover the poetics of everyday ecologies since the eighteenth century. This has partly been funded by a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and has so far resulted in an article on the eighteenth-century naturalist, Gilbert White and 'everydayness'.