Staff profile

I joined the Department as a Fixed-Term Lecturer in 1998 before being appointed to a permanent Lecturership in 2002. I was subsequently appointed as Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of English Studies. During my career at Durham, I have chaired a variety of Departmental and University committees and held a number of key positions within the Department. These roles have included serving as the MA Director and Chair of the Board of Examiners, as well as acting as Deputy Head of Department and Director of Postgraduate Studies (2013-2017). In 2007, I was a founding co-director of the 'Romantic Dialogues and Research Group' which held a recent international colloborative event with the University of Notre Dame, USA, centred on 'Pushing the Boundaries of Romantic Studies: New Horizons'. 

I am currently involved with an international network on Romanticism, synchronicity, and the poetics of simultaneity and gave an invited presentation (August 2023) on this topic at a workshop hosted by the University of Tübingen, Germany. I  was a member of the Executive Committee of the British Association of Romantic Studies and the editor of its binannually published BARS Review from 2017-2024. I have served as an external examiner at the universities of Anglia-Ruskin, Cumbria, Glasgow, Newcastle, Periyar (India),Plymouth, and Sheffield. As an invited Overseas Expert Panel Member, I have advised appointing committees at the universities of Government College and Sargodah, Pakistan. I was a member of the AHRC Peer-Review College (2008-11) and acted, more recently, as an expert panel member for the Irish Research Council Laureate Awards (2021-22). I have been an invited book prize panel judge for learned societies such as the British Association of Romantic Studies (2017-18) and the International Byron Society (2024). I have been invited to give public and keynote lectures, nationally, in Grasmere, London, and Oxford, and, internationally, in Frascati, Texas, and Tokyo.  

My research interests are in Romanticism, especially the poetry and poetics of the period. I published my first monograph on the Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Ashgate, 2005) and a second book-length study of Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (Ashgate, 2013). I have started to research a complementary study of Spectral Presences in Romantic and Victorian Poetry: From Wordsworth to the Brownings. Growing out of my interest in Romantic poetics and the spectral I co-organised, in 2015, a public lecture series and exhibition on the ghostly under the auspices of Institute of Advanced Study's theme of 'Evidence'. The lecture series led to a co-edited collection on Ghostly Encounters: Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Routledge, 2021). My interests in the Romantics extend to the imaginative and cultural legacies that Romanticism confers to the literary and cultural imagination of the late nineteenth century and beyond. I co-edited a critical collection of essays on Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era (Ashgate, 2008) and edited a volume on Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, 2012). 

My other co-edited collections, including Venice and the Cultural Imagination (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) and The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to the Moderns (Pickering & Chatto, 2015), explore further the complexities of Romanticism's imaginative and cultural afterlives. My co-edited collection, Decadent Romanticism 1780-1914 (Ashgate, 2015), addresses more fully these concerns about the cultural and imaginative reactions (positive and negative) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Romantic literary culture.

My additional research interests in critical theory and twentieth-century British and American Literature (including Jewish American Literature of the post-war era) are brought together in discrete, but inter-related, ways in my recent third-book length study of Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and the Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 2021; issued in paperback 2023). In connection with this research, I was awarded a Visiting Scholars Fellowship (between August and September 2017) to work with the nineteenth-century rare books and special manuscripts collection at the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, USA.

I returned to Baylor University as the three-month Research Fellow at the Armstrong Browning Library between January and April 2022. During my time there, I researched materials related to my current book project on Spectral Presences in Romantic and Victorian Poetry, as well as exploring rare primary materials for four-volumes on Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914. Under my general editorship, this four-volume set is scheduled for publication with Routledge's Historical Resource series in 2025. My continued research interests and publications in the field of Romanticism, ageing, memory, mourning, and mortality have led to my involvement as an Advisory Board Member (since 2013) of the Centre for Death and Life Studies based here in Durham.  

(Office hours in term time: Tuesdays, 1-2pm. Please contact me by email to make an appointment)

Postgraduate Supervision:

I have supervised successful doctoral theses on various aspects of Romantic poetry and poetics, including the thought and writing of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Burns.

Research Proposals

I would be interested in proposals on any aspect of Romantic Literature (especially Romantic poetry; philosophy; subjectivity; grief; questions of Romantic legacy and inheritance).

I would also welcome proposals for postgraduate research on any aspect of the inheritance or disinheritance of Romantic writing, culture, and thought in British or American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

 

• American Literature
• Romantic Poetry

Authored book

• Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment
  
  Sandy, M. (2021). Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment. Edinburgh University Press.
• Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning
  
  Sandy, M. (2013). Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning. Ashgate Publishing.
• Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley: Nietzschean Subjectivity and Genre
  
  Sandy, M. (2005). Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley: Nietzschean Subjectivity and Genre. Ashgate Publishing.

Chapter in book

• Byron in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature
  
  Sandy, M. (2024). Byron in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature. In A. Rawes & J. Shears (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (pp. 516-530). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808800.013.36
• 'A Season Changes Colour to No End': Keats's 'To Autumn', Wallace Stevens, and the Post-Romantic Imagination
  
  Sandy, M. (2022). ’A Season Changes Colour to No End’: Keats’s ’To Autumn’, Wallace Stevens, and the Post-Romantic Imagination. In B. Lau, G. Kucich, & D. Johnson (Eds.), Keats’s Reading / Reading Keats: Essays in Memory of Jack Stillinger. Palgrave.
• "Thy Wreck a Glory": Venice, Subjectivity, and Temporality in Byron, Shelley, and the Post-Romantic Imagination
  
  Sandy, M. (2021). "Thy Wreck a Glory": Venice, Subjectivity, and Temporality in Byron, Shelley, and the Post-Romantic Imagination. In S. Laniel-Musitelli & C. Sabiron (Eds.), Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities (pp. 206-224). Open Books. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0232
• Strange Truths: Romantic Reimaginings in Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon
  
  Sandy, M. (2019). Strange Truths: Romantic Reimaginings in Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. In K. Boyiopoulos, A. Patterson, & M. Sandy (Eds.), Literary and cultural alternatives to Modernism : unsettling presences. (pp. 38-51). Routledge.
• "A Ruin Amidst Ruins": Modernity, Literary Aphorism, and Romantic Fragments
  
  Sandy, M. (2019). "A Ruin Amidst Ruins": Modernity, Literary Aphorism, and Romantic Fragments. In K. Boyiopoulos & M. Shallcross (Eds.), Aphoristic Modernity: 1880 to the present (pp. 37-52). Anthem.
• 'Constructions et concepts du romantisme Quelques réflexions sur les perspectives anglo-saxonnes'
  
  Sandy, M. (2018). ’Constructions et concepts du romantismeQuelques réflexions sur les perspectives anglo-saxonnes’. In V. (trans) Feullebois & J.-L. Diaz (Eds.), Lectures critiques du romantisme au XXe siècle. (pp. 163-97). Classiques Garnier. https://doi.org/10.15122/isbn.978-2-406-08071-8
• American Writing
  
  Sandy, M. (2017). American Writing. In M. O’Neill (Ed.), John Keats in Context. (pp. 300-309). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107707474.031
• "The Last Great Romantic": Nietzsche's Decadence Out of the Spirit of Romanticism
  
  Sandy, M. (2015). "The Last Great Romantic": Nietzsche’s Decadence Out of the Spirit of Romanticism. In K. Boyiopoulos & M. Sandy (Eds.), Decadent Romanticism 1780-1914 (pp. 131-144). Ashgate Publishing.
• "Ghostly Language": Spectral Presences and Subjectivity in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain Poems
  
  Sandy, M. (2015). "Ghostly Language": Spectral Presences and Subjectivity in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain Poems. In S. Laniel-Musitelli & T. Constantinesco (Eds.), Romanticism and philosophy : thinking with literature. (pp. 60-73). Routledge.
• "The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma": The Persistence of Beauty and Death in the Poetics of Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens
  
  Sandy, M. (2015). "The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma": The Persistence of Beauty and Death in the Poetics of Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. In M. O’Neill, M. Sandy, & S. Wootton (Eds.), The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to the Moderns. (pp. 71-85). Pickering & Chatto.
• Quest Poetry: Alastor and Epipsychidion
  
  Sandy, M. (2013). Quest Poetry: Alastor and Epipsychidion. In M. O’Neill & A. Howe (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. (pp. 272-88). Oxford UP.
• Reimagining Venice and Visions of Decay in Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and Thomas Mann
  
  Sandy, M. (2012). Reimagining Venice and Visions of Decay in Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and Thomas Mann. In M. O’Neill, M. Sandy, & S. Wootton (Eds.), Venice and the Cultural Imagination: ’This Strange Dream upon the Water’ (pp. 27-42). Pickering & Chatto.
• "Fiery Particle": Keats's Romantic Presences in the Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald
  
  Sandy, M. (2012). "Fiery Particle": Keats’s Romantic Presences in the Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In M. Sandy (Ed.), Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (pp. 149-162). Ashgate Publishing.
• '"Echoes of that Voice:" Romantic Resonances in Victorian Poetic Birdsong'.
  
  Sandy, M. (2008). ’"Echoes of that Voice:" Romantic Resonances in Victorian Poetic Birdsong’. In A. Radford & M. Sandy (Eds.), Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era (pp. 155-173). Ashgate Publishing.
• 'Ruinous Perfection': Reading Authors and Writing Readers in Romantic Fragments
  
  Sandy, M. (2007). ’Ruinous Perfection’: Reading Authors and Writing Readers in Romantic Fragments. In A. Rawes (Ed.), Romanticism and form. (pp. 60-77). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Jewish American Literature
  
  Sandy, M. (2005). Jewish American Literature. In M. Booker (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics: Censorship, Revolution, and Writing (pp. 384-388). Greenhorn Press.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley; A Political Poet
  
  Sandy, M. (2005). Percy Bysshe Shelley; A Political Poet. In M. Booker (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics: Censorship, Revolution, and Writing (pp. 654-655). Greenhorn Press.
• William Drummond: A Biographical Entry
  
  Sandy, M. (2002). William Drummond: A Biographical Entry. In W. Mander & A. Sell (Eds.), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers. Thoemmes Press.
• "[W]hate’er these words cannot express": Transgressive Fictions in Shelley’s "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", "To a Skylark", and "Ode to the West Wind"
  
  Sandy, M. (2002). "[W]hate’er these words cannot express": Transgressive Fictions in Shelley’s "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", "To a Skylark", and "Ode to the West Wind". In F. Price & S. Masson (Eds.), Silence, sublimity and suppression in the Romantic period. (pp. 23-41). Edwin Mellen Press.

Edited book

• Literary, Cultural, and Material Responses to Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914.
  
  Davies, D., McCullough, M., Sandy, M., Scarre, G., & Whitefield, R. (Eds.). (in press). Literary, Cultural, and Material Responses to Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914. Routledge.
• Historical, Political, and Public Responses to Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914.
  
  Davies, D., McCullough, M., Sandy, M., Scarre, G., & Whitefield, R. (Eds.). (in press). Historical, Political, and Public Responses to Death, Loss, Memory, and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century: 1780-1914. Routledge.
• Ghostly Encounters: Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
  
  Cracolici, S., & Sandy, M. (Eds.). (2021). Ghostly Encounters: Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Routledge.
• Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism: Unsettling Presences
  
  Boyiopoulos, K., Patterson, A., & Sandy, M. (Eds.). (2019). Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism: Unsettling Presences. Routledge.
• Decadent Romanticism: 1780-1914
  
  Boyiopoulos, K., & Sandy, M. (Eds.). (2015). Decadent Romanticism: 1780-1914. Ashgate Publishing.
• The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns
  
  O’Neill, M., Sandy, M., & Wootton, S. (Eds.). (2015). The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns. Pickering & Chatto.
• Venice and the Cultural Imagination: 'This Strange Dream upon the Water'
  
  O’Neill, M., Sandy, M., & Wootton, S. (Eds.). (2012). Venice and the Cultural Imagination: ’This Strange Dream upon the Water’. Pickering & Chatto.
• Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century
  
  Sandy, M. (Ed.). (2012). Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century. Ashgate Publishing.
• Modelling the Self. Special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net
  
  Sandy, M., & Wootton, S. (Eds.). (2008). Modelling the Self. Special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Consortium Erudit.
• Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era.
  
  Radford, A., & Sandy, M. (Eds.). (2008). Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era. Ashgate Publishing.
• Romanticism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies
  
  O’Neill, M., & Sandy, M. (Eds.). (2005). Romanticism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Routledge.

Journal Article

• The Wordsworth Circle
  
  Sandy, M., & Wu, D. (Eds.). (2024). The Wordsworth Circle. The Wordsworth Circle, 55(1). https://doi.org/10.1086/730758
• Preface to 'The Wordsworth Circle: In Honor of Michael O'Neill'
  
  Sandy, M., & Wu, D. (2024). Preface to ’The Wordsworth Circle: In Honor of Michael O’Neill’. The Wordsworth Circle, 55(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1086/730398
• "Shadowy Recollections": Shelley's Imaginative Encounters with Wordsworth
  
  Sandy, M. (2024). "Shadowy Recollections": Shelley’s Imaginative Encounters with Wordsworth. The Wordsworth Circle, 55(1), 121-136. https://doi.org/10.1086/730245
• The Sense of an Ending: Poetic Spaces and Closure in Keats's 1819 Odes
  
  Sandy, M. (2022). The Sense of an Ending: Poetic Spaces and Closure in Keats’s 1819 Odes. Romanticism, 28(2), 188-196. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2022.0554
• "I Have Thought/Too Long and Darkly": Writing and Reading Modes of Being in Byron
  
  Sandy, M. (2020). "I Have Thought/Too Long and Darkly": Writing and Reading Modes of Being in Byron. Byron Journal, 48(2), 133-143. https://doi.org/10.3828/bj.2020.19
• ‘Strength in What Remains Behind’: Wordsworth and the Question of Ageing
  
  Sandy, M. (2019). ‘Strength in What Remains Behind’: Wordsworth and the Question of Ageing. Romanticism, 25(3), 261-270. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2019.0431
• "Lines of Light": Poetic Variations in Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley.'
  
  Sandy, M. (2016). "Lines of Light": Poetic Variations in Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley.’. Romanticism, 22(3), 260-268. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0287
• Wordsworth and the Circulation of Grief
  
  Sandy, M. (2012). Wordsworth and the Circulation of Grief. Essays in Criticism, 62(3), 248-264. https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgs010
• '"Cut by Rainbow": Tales, Tellers, and Reimagining Wordsworth's Pastoral Poetics in Toni Morrison's Beloved and A Mercy'.
  
  Sandy, M. (2011). ’"Cut by Rainbow": Tales, Tellers, and Reimagining Wordsworth’s Pastoral Poetics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy’. MELUS, 36(2), 35-51.
• "The Colossal Fabric’s Form": Remodelling Memory, History, and Forgetting in Byron’s Poetic Recollections of Ruins
  
  Sandy, M. (2008). "The Colossal Fabric’s Form": Remodelling Memory, History, and Forgetting in Byron’s Poetic Recollections of Ruins. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 51. https://doi.org/10.7202/019258ar
• "Webbed with Golden Lines:" Saul Bellow's Romanticism.
  
  Sandy, M. (2008). "Webbed with Golden Lines:" Saul Bellow’s Romanticism. Romanticism, 14(1), 57-67. https://doi.org/10.1353/rom.0.0013
• Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Keats Criticism
  
  Sandy, M. (2006). Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Keats Criticism. Literature Compass, 3(6), 1320-1333. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00379.x
• "To See as a God Sees:" The Potential Ubermensch in Keats's 'Hyperion' Fragments
  
  Sandy, M. (1998). "To See as a God Sees:" The Potential Ubermensch in Keats’s ’Hyperion’ Fragments. Romanticism, 4(2), 212-223.
• "Stormy Visions:" Shelley's Re-invention of Myth, Memory and Identity in Adonais
  
  Sandy, M. (n.d.). "Stormy Visions:" Shelley’s Re-invention of Myth, Memory and Identity in Adonais. Keats-Shelley Review, 14, 84-94.
• Dream Lovers and Tragic Romance: Negative Fictions in Keats's Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes , and Isabella
  
  Sandy, M. (n.d.). Dream Lovers and Tragic Romance: Negative Fictions in Keats’s Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes , and Isabella. Romanticism on the Net, 20, 1-12.
• Modelling the Self: Subjectivity and Identity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Thought and Culture
  
  Sandy, M., & Wootton, S. (n.d.). Modelling the Self: Subjectivity and Identity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Thought and Culture. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 51.

Other (Print)

• Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biographical Entry
  
  Sandy, M. (2002). Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biographical Entry (R. Clark, Ed.). The Literary Encyclopedia.