Dr Chris Townsend

Dr Chris Townsend

Associate Lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2682
Email
ct97@st-andrews.ac.uk

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Biography

I received my B.A. from the University of Exeter, and my M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where I also taught for four years. I took up the role of Research Fellow in the School of English in September 2023, and began a stint as Associate Lecturer in 2025, but I was previously a visiting Fleeman Fellow in ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø in 2018.

Research areas

I'm an Associate Lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature, with interests that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I'm currently working on a book on abolitionist poetry, with particular focus on how the drive to write political verse in the abolitionist period contributed to the poetic formal diversity we associate with Romanticism.

Current work includes essays on William Cowper's blank verse, the perceived relation of rhyme to commercial cultiure in the eighteenth century, and the uses of the 'unheroic' form of the anapaestic tetrameter couplet in antislavery poetry. I'm increasingly interested in Cowper, and will be contributing an essay (on 'Abolitionist Writings') to theÌýOxford Handbook to William Cowper.

I've published broadly on poetic form and formal history, including essays on rhyme and rhythm in figures like Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Mary Robinson, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson. I've published dedicated essays on writers as far back as Pope, and as close to the present as Elif Batuman.

Publications

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—(Cambridge University Press, 2022)
—Ìý(Oxford University Press, 2022)

Selected publications

  • Open access
    Townsend, C., 11 Dec 2025, (E-pub ahead of print) In: English Literary History. 92, 4, p. 1019-1048

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Townsend, C., 1 Apr 2025, Percy Shelley in context. Wilson, R. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 165-171 (Literature in context (Cambridge University Press)).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

  • Open access
    Townsend, C., 21 Aug 2024, In: European Romantic Review. 35, 3, p. 495-510 16 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Open access
    Townsend, C., 1 Jan 2024, In: Literature Compass. 21, 1-3, 14 p., e12702.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Townsend, C., 1 Nov 2024, In: Modern Philology. 122, 2, p. 263-285 23 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Open access
    Townsend, C., 3 Oct 2023, In: English Studies. 104, 7, p. 1218-1235 18 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Townsend, C., 1 Sept 2023, In: Poetics Today. 44, 3, p. 347-378 32 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Townsend, C., 20 Oct 2022, In: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 63, 5, p. 587-596 10 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

  • Townsend, C., 5 May 2022, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 228 p.

    Research output: Book/Report › Book

  • Open access
    Townsend, C., 17 Jul 2022, In: Critical Quarterly. 64, 2, p. 59-83 25 p.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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