Noel Jackson

Associate Professor

Noel Jackson received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 2001, and has been working at MIT since that year. He works on topics in poetry and poetics, aesthetics, critical theory, and the literature of the long eighteenth century, particularly British Romanticism. He is the author of Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and of essays appearing in journals including ELH, MLQ, Studies in Romanticism, and elsewhere.

Subjects

Subjects taught the current academic year:

21L.000[J] Writing About Literature: A Random Walk Through Literature and Film (Spring 2025)

21L.004 Reading Poetry (Fall 2024)

21L.320 Big Books: *Infinite Jest* (Spring 2025)

Subjects taught in recent years:

21L.004 Reading Poetry (Spring 2024)

21L.704 Studies in Poetry: The Radical Imagination (Spring 2024)

Research Interests

Poetry and poetics, British Romanticism, critical theory

Publications

Books
Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry
Cambridge University Press, 2008
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521869379

Articles
“The Senses,” William Wordsworth in Context, ed. Andrew Bennett. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2014.

“Literature and the Senses,” The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2014.

“The Time of Beauty” Studies in Romanticism 50.2 (Summer 2011): 309-332.

“Coleridge’s Criticism of Life,” The Coleridge Bulletin NS 37 (Summer 2011): 21-34.

“Rhyme and Reason: Erasmus Darwin’s Romanticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.2 (June 2009): 171-194.

“Archaeologies of Perception: Reading Wordsworth After Foucault,” European Romantic Review 18, no. 2 (April 2007): 175-185.

“Rethinking the Cultural Divide: Walter Pater, Wilkie Collins, and the Legacies of Wordsworthian Aesthetics,” Modern Philology 102, no. 2 (November 2004): 207-234.

“Critical Conditions: Coleridge, ‘Common Sense,’ and the Literature of Self-Experiment,” ELH 70, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 117-149.

Short Essays and Reviews
“On MOOCs; and Some Possible Futures for Higher Education,” blog of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard, June 4, 2013.
http://noelbjackson.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/29/

Review of Jeffrey C. Robinson, Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism, in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 55 (August 2009)

“Strange Power of Speech,” The Lancet 374, no. 9700 (October 31, 2009): 1494-1495.

Review of Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism, in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 13 (2006): 396-400.

“Historiography: Britain” and “Solitude and Community,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 504-5, 1067-8.

Review of Maureen McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species, in Modern Philology 101, no. 3 (February 2004): 477-80.

Review of Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, in Keats-Shelley Journal 52 (2003): 233-235.