Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Michael Simpson

BA (Hons) English, Cambridge University, 1980; MA Romantic Literature, York University, 1983; PhD English, Cambridge University, 1989; Junior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1994-5; Junior Fellow, British Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1998-9; appointed Goldsmiths College, 1999.

Teaching

Michael Simpson is the convenor of Sensibility & Romanticism (Level 2) and of Oedipus: Myths, Tragedies & Theories (Level 3). He has also taught the half-unit course Romantic Shakespeare (Level 3) and on the Explorations in Literature (Level 1) and Shakespeare (Level 2) courses.

Areas of supervision

Recent projects include

• Voices, Identities and Nations in the Narratives of Maria Edgeworth
• Romanticism and Socialism in William Morris
• The Novels of Mary Shelley and William Godwin.

Plus Masters of Research (MRes) projects on hypertext fiction and theory, and on sexuality in the prophetic books of William Blake.

Professional activities

• Member, Editorial Board, The Hazlitt Review
• Member, Steering Group, Classical Reception Studies Network
• Member, Classical Reception Studies Network
• Member, British Association of Romantic Studies
• Member, Wordsworth and Coleridge Association
• Member, British Comparative Literature Association
• External Examiner, MA Literature & Criticism, University of Greenwich, 2003-6
• Peer reviewer for major academic presses, scholarly journals and the AHRC

Research interests

Michael Simpson’s research interests span Romanticism, classical reception and postcolonialism. He has published critical work across the broad field of Romantic literary culture, on drama and theatre, poetry and the novel. His interest in the Greco-Roman classics lies particularly in how they have been adapted within postcolonial and especially African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American literatures and theatres. Within Romantic literary studies, he is currently writing a book on the related themes of distraction and bibliophobia in British Romantic literature; within classical reception studies, he is co-editing and contributing to a volume of essays on the Olympic Games and the classical tradition, to be published in 2011.

Selected publications

• (with Barbara Goff) Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone and Dramas of the African Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley (Stanford University Press, 1998)
• 'Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary: T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Elder Statesman', Comparative Drama, Special Issue on 'Translation, Performance, and Reception of Greek Drama, 1900-1950: International Dialogues', ed. Amanda Wrigley, 44 (forthcoming 2010).
  
• (with Barbara Goff) 'Voice from the Black Box: Sylvain Bemba's Flight of Santigone', in Mobilizing Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, ed. Helene Foley and Erin Mee (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
• 'Classical Greek Drama' in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romanticism (Drama volume), ed. Fred Burwick (Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming)
  
• 'Byron's Manfred and the King's Head: Having Words with Bodies', The Byron Journal 37.1 (2009)
  
• 'Telling Lives to Children: Young versus New Historicism in Little Arthur’s History of England' in Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy, ed. Damian Walford Davies (Routledge, 2008)
• ‘Byron in Theory and Theatre Land: Drury Lane and the Right Address’ in Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies, ed. Jane Stabler (Palgrave, 2007)
• ‘The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame’ in Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie (Oxford University Press, 2007)
• ‘Wavering on Europe: Walter Scott and the Equilibrium of the Empires’, Romanticism 11.2 (2005)
• ‘Strange Fits of Parallax: Wordsworth’s Geometric Excursions’, The Wordsworth Circle (Winter 2003)
• ‘Behind Harold’s Bloomsday Book: Gothic Secrets in Literary History’, Women: A Cultural Review (Winter 2003)
• ‘The Morning (Post) After: Apocalypse and Bathos in Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude”’ in Romanticism and Millenarianism, ed. Tim Fulford. (Palgrave, 2002)
• 'Re-Opening after the Old Price Riots: War and Peace at Drury Lane', Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41.4 (1999)
• 'Coleridge's Swinging Moods and the Revision of "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"', Style 33.1 (1999)
• 'Who Didn't Kill Blake's Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in "Songs of Experience"' in William Blake, ed. John Lucas (Longman, 1998)
• "Hyped Text: The Rhetoric of Virtual Space in Critical Prose", Prose Studies 20.3 (1997)