Tara Lee researches 18th- and 19th-century British literature, ideas, and culture, with a particular focus on the intersections between literature, science, and technology during the Romantic period. Tara obtained her AHRC-funded DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford. Her first book, William Blake and Romantic Biology: Evolution, Originality, and Organic Form (contracted with Cambridge University Press), explores how Blake’s illuminated books and artworks engaged deeply with a range of intellectual discourses—political, theological, poetic, and aesthetic—that were shaped by debates about the self-organizing nature of living forms. While many Romantic-era writers and artists viewed vitality as an electric, plastic force of self-creation, Blake was influenced by a preformationist discourse that emphasized the stamina or kernel of identity in each being over material processes of change and development. This book argues that revisiting Blake’s works within the context of conflicting 18th- and early 19th-century understandings of organic form is essential to gaining a deeper appreciation of his radical perspectives on individuality, politics, and art.

Tara’s second monograph examines the role of technology in the Romantic epic. Noting Blake’s curious references to machines described as “living” and “self-moving,” Tara investigates how Romantic-era poets saw intimations of vitality in mechanical form. Funded by an HKRGC GRF grant, her project, Visionary Machines: Technology and the Epic in Britain, 1790–1830, explores how poets reimagined “epic machinery” for a modern age. By demonstrating how poets drew on epic conventions to enrich the symbolism of the machine, her work reveals how machines became such potent emblems of modernity because they allowed for evocative engagements with the past. As part of this project, Tara is also creating a database and related digital resources to facilitate the application of distant-reading techniques to 19th-century long narrative poetry.

Beyond these projects, Tara is interested in 19th-century depictions of Hong Kong, the poetics of space and place, lyric theory, and the environmental humanities. Her articles on Keats and birdsong, Southey and Indian mythology, and other Romantic-era topics have been published in journals such as European Romantic Review, Studies in Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net, and The Keats-Shelley Review.

18th and 19th Century British Literature and Culture (Romanticism & Victorian); Literature, Science, and Technology; Biopolitics and the Body; Print and Visual Culture; Literary Theory and Poetics (especially Lyric and Epic); Orientalism and Empire; Environmental Humanities and Animal Studies; Digital Humanities

ENGL1022 – Introduction to Poetry

ENGL2055 – Gothic

ENGL1014 – Space and Place in Literature

ENGL2076 – Romanticism

ENGL3041 – Senior Colloquium in English Studies (Special Topic: Literature and Visual Culture)

Anya Adair researches medieval English literature, as well as pre-modern English law and legal culture. Her focus is Old English law and literature, but her research extends also to Old Norse and Anglo-Latin, medieval language interaction, book history and manuscript studies, poetry and poetics, digital humanities, and the history of the English language.

Anya holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne and graduate degrees in English from Melbourne, Oxford and Yale. At Melbourne, Yale and HKU, she has taught courses in interdisciplinary law and literature, legal history, medieval and early modern English literature, creative writing, the history of the English language, palaeography and codicology, and digital humanities.

The historical scope of Anya’s present research covers the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. It aims to unite more closely the fields of medieval law and medieval literature, and to provide insight into the intellectual, emotional and social dimensions of legal and literary production across the period. Her interest in legal and literary culture takes her work into the history of emotion, historical linguistics, religious writing, poetry, poetics and rhetoric, as well as palaeography, codicology, and the history of law. In all of these dimensions, Anya’s research is driven by a fascination with the minutiae of language, and the potential of its smallest detail to solve the puzzles of the past.

Old and Middle English literature; medieval English literature; law and literature; pre-modern English legal history; book history; manuscript studies; digital humanities.

A funded MPhil place is offered for a suitable candidate researching. Visit here for details.