Current PhD Students

Hannah McAuliffe

Thesis Title:

'I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans’: System in the work of William Blake

Supervisor:

Professor Jon Mee

Description:

My doctoral research explores the role of and response to systems in the poetry and visual art of William Blake. My methodology combines theoretical and material approaches to Blake’s systems to study them aesthetically, formally, and in terms of the materiality of his medium through which his system comes into being and can be dis- or re-assembled. Analysing Blake’s work from an ontological perspective, my research highlights the cultural purchase that Blake’s art has today by engaging with wider debates within Romantic studies and the humanities regarding systems and the formations of knowledge.

I began my AHRC funded PhD at York in 2021, having graduated with a Masters with Distinction and first in class from Durham University. Alongside my research, I co-organise the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies’s Postgraduate Forum, in addition to an upcoming conference at York, Image/Text—What Next?. More generally, my research interests include Romanticism, poetry and poetics, philosophy, aesthetics, and material culture. In my spare time, I enjoy writing poetry, walking my dogs, and listening to music.