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Professor Emma Mason


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Professor

emma dot mason at warwick dot ac dot uk


emmajmason.wordpress.com

5.44 Faculty of Arts Building
University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7EQ


About

Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies. BA English Literature; MA Critical and Cultural Theory (University of Cardiff-Wales); PhD English and Comparative Literary Studies (University of Warwick and University of Madison-Wisconsin); British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (Corpus Christi, Oxford). I served as Head of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick from 2018-2023. My research and teaching are focused on Christianity and literature, Catholic contemplation/mysticism, eighteenth and nineteenth-century studies, and Christian ecology.

Research

Christian eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry; Catholic contemplation/mysticism; kenosis; literature, ecology, religion. Recent publications include Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018). Future publications include volume III of the Complete Poems of William Barnes (Oxford University Press), William Barnes' Dialect Poems in the Dorset County Chronicle (Edinburgh University Press), The 1810s for the Cambridge University Press series, Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition, and Weird Faith in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Theologies at Work (Bloomsbury) with Mark Knight.

With Mark Knight, I edit the Bloomsbury monograph series New Directions in Religion and Literature. I serve on the editorial boards of Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press), The John Clare Society Journal, and the Romanticism pathway of Literature Compass (Blackwell). I'm a member of the Power of the Word Project, Scholars of Religion and Literature Network, The Kilvert Society, and Arts Emergency.

Teaching and supervision

I teach undergraduate and postgraduate modules on religion, poetry, emotion, and philosophy; and welcome PhD students with interests in eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry and Christianity; as well as modern/contemporary Christian poetry.

Recent and forthcoming publications (full list here)

'The Quiet Life', The Oxford Handbook of William Cowper, ed. Jess Fay and Andrew Hodgson (Oxford University Press, 2026).

'Callista: theology and imagination' (provisional title), Newman's Educational Philosophy, Writing, and Legacy, ed. Fr. Juan R. VĂ©lez (Gracewing, 2025).

'Ecology', The Cambridge Companion to Religion in Victorian Literary Culture, ed. Mark Knight (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

'Contemplation and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism', Inventing the Secular, ed. Erik Tonning (Brill, 2024).

'Religion', The Cambridge Companion to John Clare, ed. Sarah Houghton-Walker (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

'Reading Christian Experience', Modern Language Quarterly, 83. 4 (2022), 521–537.

Appointments

I am on study leave until Easter 2026 and checking email only intermittently. You can find contact details for the department online.

Undergraduate modules
  • Romantic and Victorian Poetry
  • Blake and Wordsworth
  • Religion and Literature (in development)
  • Poetry and Emotion
  • What Are Poets For?
  • Problems in Philosophy and Literature
Postgraduate modules
  • Poetry and Poetics
  • Romantic Elegy

NDRL

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