Matthew Ward

I joined the University of Birmingham in 2016, after teaching at the University of St Andrews, where I also obtained my PhD. I took my MA at Oxford, and my M.Phil at Cambridge. Prior to my postgraduate studies, I worked as a nursing auxiliary in a medical assessment unit in a busy hospital in South Wales.

My primary interests lie in British Romanticism, especially the poetry of Byron, William Wordsworth, Keats, and Percy Shelley, and Romantic thought, particularly as it develops out of eighteenth-century moral philosophy and influences post-Romantic literature. Much of my work in recent years has revolved around literary inheritance, especially Byronic forms of influence and exchange, and the relation between emotions and theories of knowledge and literary history, form, and technique, as well as links between senses of humour and senses of the poetic. I also have a growing interest in the intersection between ways of knowing, emotions and affect, and the environmental humanities, especially the sea and seashores.

My monograph, Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling (Oxford University Press, 2024), offers the first in-depth account of the significance of the laughable to the lives and lines of verse of the Romantics. Laughter has generally gone unheard by critics of the period. When acknowledged at all, it tends to be shorthand to denote the humorous. I read it as an affect and embodied experience that tells us much about Romantic emotions, but also sheds new light on how poets conceived of and fashioned their verse - drawing relations between outbursts of laughter and, say, the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' registered through poetry and that is so suggestive of notions of creativity. The book details the strange and inexplicable nature of laughable experiences, and illustrates how laughter articulated and undermined sympathetic feeling.

I have a long-standing interest in Byron's poetry and its relation to Romantic and post-Romantic literature. Even in the solitude of writing, Byron was of a sociable bent. He constantly thought about himself in comparison with other poets. Yet there’s a pervasive tendency in both the popular and academic imagination to think about Byron’s influence in terms of his personal character rather than his art. I’m keen to push at these issues, the first result of which was a symposium in January 2018, co-organised with Dr Clare Bucknell (University of Oxford). The symposium brought together contributors to exchange ideas about the many ways Byron might be thought to be – perhaps more than most – ‘among’ the poets: alluding and alluded to; collaborative; competitive; parodied; worked and reworked in canons, pantheons, anthologies and miscellanies. A second result of this research is an edited collection, Byron Among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2021). I continue to write about Byron's poetic afterlives, reconsidering poetic practice and criticism, and forms of Romanticism, in light of Byron's influence. And I am also editing his plays and poetry for a new edition of his works as part of the Longman Annotated English Poets series.

I'm also working on projects to do with the emotions and affect, and various forms of knowing or understanding - or often failures of understanding - in relation to poetry, ecology and the environmental humanities. Currently, I'm thinking about how our experience and sense of the non-human emerges out of or draws out funny feelings of various kinds (the strange and inexplicable, the confounding and distressing, but also the laughable and funny haha). Looking beyond the Romantic period, this project also expands on my interests in poetic legacies, and how natural environments - especially the shorelines and coasts - are meeting points for poets across time, echoing the rhythms of poetry through the sounds of the sea.