Research Interests: Late eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and culture; poetry and poetics; historiography; critical theory; science and literature

Noel Jackson teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature with a focus on British Romanticism. His first book, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, examines how Romantic poets (notably Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, and Keats) define the categories of art experience, and articulate the social purposes of aesthetic form, in relation to the sciences of mind with which literary aesthetics was both contemporary and conceptually allied. Foregrounding the preoccupation of Romantic authors with forms of sense experience unique to the poet and to the encounter with poetry, the book reads this investment in the context of a comprehensive endeavor to situate literary aesthetics – the science of aisthesis or sensuous experience – at the heart of human-scientific knowledge, and as a key contribution to its ethical and political project.

He is now at work on a project tentatively titled Artificial Intelligence: British Poetry and the Work of Reason, which examines how poets both immediately anterior to and post-dating the period of British Romanticism – from the scientific poets of the late eighteenth century to the imagist poets of early modernism – accommodate rational thought processes to imaginative work and to conceptions of imaginative thinking.

In addition to regular introductory-level teaching on poetry and prose fiction, he has co-taught with Professors Raman and Kibel “The Art of the Probable: Literature and Probability,” and has offered intermediate-level courses and advanced seminars on various subjects in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, including the Romantic novel, epistemology and subjectivity in the long eighteenth century, aesthetic cognition and ethical life, and on poetry and the sciences of mind. His teaching and research interests include topics in poetry and poetics, the relations of science to literature, and the history and structure of aesthetic experience. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2001.

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry
Cambridge University Press, 2008

"Rhyme and Reason: Erasmus Darwin's Romanticism," Modern Language Quarterly (forthcoming)

"Archaeologies of Perception: Reading Wordsworth After Foucault," European Romantic Review 18, no. 2 (April 2007): 175-85.

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

"Rethinking the Cultural Divide:  Walter Pater, Wilkie Collins, and the Legacies of Wordsworthian Aesthetics," Modern Philology 102, no. 2 (November 2004): 207-34.

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

21L.003 Reading Fiction

21L.004 Reading Poetry

21L.017 The Art of the Probable: Literature and Probability

21L.470 Eighteenth-Century Literature

21L.471 Major English Novels

21L.476 Romantic Poetry

21L.701 Literary Interpretation

21L704 Studies in Poetry: British Poetry and the Sciences of the Mind

21L704 Studies in Poetry: What's the Use of Beauty?