English and Related Literature
Jon Mee
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Profile
Biography
Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the English Department.
He came to York in 2013 after seven years at the University of Warwick as Professor of English and over a decade in the English Faculty at Oxford where he was Margaret Candfield Fellow in English at University College and Professor of the Literature of the Romantic Period. Before moving to Oxford, he was a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University. Jon did his undergraduate degree at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne followed by a PhD at Cambridge. He was a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, before moving to Australia in 1991.
His most recent book is Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism: The Laurel of Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2016, paperback 2018). The research for the book was funded by an AHRC fellowship. His previous monograph, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762-1830 (Oxford University Press), based on research funded by a Phillip J. Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, came out in paperback in 2013. During the course of working on the book, he held fellowships at the University of Chicago (2008), the Yale Centre for British Art (2009), and the Australian National University (2009). He has also held a visiting fellowship at the University of New Delhi.
Jon was PI on the Leverhulme Major Project Grant ‘Networks of Improvement’ from 2011 to 2015. The project was concerned with the circulation of ideas of all kinds through social networks (regional, national, colonial), especially as they defined other kinds of knowledge in relation to the literary. The work done on this project has developed in a number of other directions. It fed into the AHRC network grant – now completed - that he held with Dr Matt Sangster (University of Glasgow) on ‘Institutions of Literature.’ This research will be published as a collection of essays coming out from Cambridge University Press in 2022 under the title Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900. The AHRC network grant, in turn, fed into the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded follow-up on the 1820s, which has fed into another collection of essays Remediating the 1820s, also edited with Matt Sangster, due to come out from Edinburgh University Press in 2022.
Jon was fortunate enough to spent 2016-17 as R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library, California. The work he did there provided the basis of his current research project on the ‘Literature, Bodies, and Machines’ project that is funded by a British Academy – Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship from January 2020 to January 2021. For details see the English Department’s current featured research projects page. In March 2021, he signed a contract with the UNiversity of Chicago Press to publish this research under the title Networks of Improvement.
Jon edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of William Hazlitt, The Spirit of Controversy and other Essays James Grande (KCL), which was published in June 2021.
Research
Overview
Beyond his current project on the industrial revolution, Literature, Bodies, and Machines: Networks of Improvement 1780-1840, Jon continues to be interested in various individual authors on whom he has previously written, Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Keats, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth among them, but he is committed to supervising dissertations on authors across the 1760-1840 period. His work on the ‘transpennine enlightenment’ has given him a particular interest in Unitarian women writers associated with the region, like Barbauld, Hannah Lightbody Greg, and Elizabeth Gaskell. He is also increasingly interested in medical humanities, especially in relation to the literary physicians of the transpennine enlightenment and their research into medico-literary ideas like taste, imagination, and sensibility. These physicians include John Aikin junior, James Currie, Thomas Percival, John Ferriar, and James Phillips Kay.
Beyond individual writers, his research concerns constructions of sociability in the period, and the work of literature and the visual arts not only in representing such sociability, but also as something that flowed through and constructed these networks. This extends into his work on the role of networks in the circulation of knowledge in the period, for instance, via the literary and philosophical societies that still exist in places like Manchester and Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the mapping of literary culture more generally in the Romantic period. The 1790s remains a particular decade of interest, and he retains a special research focus on the culture of radicalism as it manifested itself in ideas, various forms of social performance (from toasts to monster meetings), and print culture.
He is also interested in the development of environmental ideas in this period, especially in relation to different attitudes towards the relationship between the natural environment and industrial development. 2021 will see the first iteration of his Green Romanticism Advanced Option Module.
Teaching
Other teaching
Jon is open to supervision on any topic in the literature and print culture of the period 1760-1840. Particular authors of interest include Lucy Aikin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Blake, William Hazlitt, the Sheffield poet James Montgomery, and William Wordsworth He is especially interested in supervising dissertations on topics in the 1790s and 1820s, anything in relation to the culture of radical politics in the period 1760-1840, and topics related to sociability, the circulation of knowledge, clubs, societies and other institutions, or constructions of the ‘literary’ in the period 1760-1840.
He also has a special interest in romanticism and the industrial revolution and - very much a related topic - also the development of environmental consciousness in the period.2021 sees the first iteration of his Green Romanticism Advanced Option Module on the undergraduate degree.
2021 sees the first iteration of his Green Romanticism Advanced Option Module on the undergraduate degree.
He has run a successful MA module ‘Literature, Medicine, and Metropolis’ recently on York’s medical humanities MA that reflects his interests in literary physicians and the industrial revolution and also a module on ‘Print and Politics in the 1790s’ for the Eighteenth-century Studies MA.
Please don’t hesitate to contact him in relation to any other topic in the long eighteenth century.
Contact details
External activities
Memberships
Jon hosted a suite of events in relation to the bicentennial of ‘Peterloo’ in 2019. These included an interview with Mike Leigh, director of the film Peterloo at the York Festival of Ideas. He also hosted two convivial ‘Beer and Ballads’ evenings which performed ballads from the period’s political protests (that’s him holding Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt’s trademark white hat).
Jon’s work for the ‘Networks of Improvement’ investigates the important role played by Literary and Philosophical Societies in the circulation of ideas. Many of these societies still exist, and he has given talks at these socieites on their own histories. Two recent ones were at the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society in 2019 at their bicentennial conference (they put ‘Philosophical’ first because they thought science was more important than the arts) and more recently at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon Tyne available here on the society’s YouTube channel.