Dr. Sophie Thomas
Biography:
Dr. Thomas joined the English Department at TMU in 2009, after previous posts at the University of Sussex in the UK and the University of Toronto. Her research explores the crosscurrents between visual culture, material culture, and literary texts. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on a variety of topics related to Romanticism, museums, and visual culture, most recently co-editing the Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts and a special issue of Museum and Society, “On the Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and the Objects of the Museum.” She is currently completing a book on objects, collections and museums in the Romantic period (The Romantic Museum, 1770 – 1830: Matter, Memory, and the Poetics of Things) and working on a new SSHRC-funded project on Romanticism, museums, and the poetics of sculpture. Her previous book, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle, focused on a variety of "sites" of seeing, and on the impact of new visual media on the literary and historical imagination.
Selected Recent Publications:
The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts, co-edited with Maureen McCue (EUP, 2023).
“Playing ‘Alive’: Performing Sculpture on the Romantic Stage,” The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre, ed. Terry Robinson and Diane Piccitto (University of Michigan Press, 2023), pp. 159-181.
“The Self-Contained Museum: Romanticism, Collecting, and the Space of Writing,” Museums in Literature: Fictionalising museums, world exhibitions, and private collections, ed. Caroline Marie and Anne Chassagnol (Museums in Literature, Brepols, 2022), pp. 28-44.
“John Soane’s Sarcophagus,” Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition (RÊVE). Posted 4 June, 2021. http://www.euromanticism.org/john-soanes-sarcophagus/#more-1914 (external link)
“‘With a master’s hand and prophet’s fire’: Blake’s Illustrations for ‘The Bard,’” Romanticism and Illustration, ed. Susan Matthews and Ian Haywood (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 47-69.
“A ‘strange and mixed assemblage’: Sir John Soane, Archivist of the Self,” Studies in Romanticism 57:1 (Spring, 2018), pp. 121-142.
“Word and Image,” The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 625-642.
“Pompeii, the Body, and the Imprint of the Ancient World,” Word & Image 33:3 (September, 2017), pp. 303-312.
“Collecting, Cultural Memory, and the Regency Museum,” Regency Revisited, ed. Tim Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra (Palgrave, 2016), pp. 159-175.
“Collection, Exhibition, and Evolution: The Romantic Museum,” in Romantic Evolutions, ed. Joshua Lambier and Joel Faflak. Literature Compass 13/10 (2016) pp. 681-690.
(Wiley Online Library) http://literature-compass.com/romanticism/ (external link)
“Painting, Spectacle, and the Visual,” William Wordsworth in Context, ed. Andrew Bennett (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 300-307.
“Feather Cloaks and English Collectors: Cook’s Voyages and the Objects of the Museum,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture,” ed. Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu (Ashgate, 2013), pp. 69-87.
“Visual Culture,” Handbook to Romanticism Studies, ed. Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright (Blackwell, 2012), pp. 87-103.
“Displaying Egypt: Archaeology, Spectacle, and the Museum in the Early Nineteenth Century,"
The Nineteenth Century Archaeological Imagination, ed. Alex Warwick and Martin Willis. Special issue of Journal of Literature and Science 5:1 (Fall, 2012), pp. 6-22.
Special Journal Issues:
Museum and Society, Vol. 17:3 (November, 2019). Guest edited, with Janine Rogers: “On the Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and the Objects of the Museum.” https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/index (external link)
Romanticism on the Net (RoN), Vol. 70 (Spring, 2018). Guest edited issue on the theme of “Recollecting the Nineteenth-Century Museum.” https://ronjournal.org/articles/n70/ (external link)
