Michael Simpson is a Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature. He has published widely, and mainly separately, on British Romanticism and classical reception.
As a romanticist, he is currently completing a monograph titled ‘Lost Plots: Romanticism and the Distractions of Reading’, and he has contributed a chapter on ‘Byron and Theatre’ to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron. Previous publications include Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley (1998), and articles and essays on Romantic theatre, lyric poetry, and the novel. He serves on the steering group of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar, in the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and on the Editorial Board of The Hazlitt Review.
As a scholar of classical reception, Michael is collaborating with Barbara Goff on a major project provisionally titled ‘Working Classics: Greece, Rome, and Cultural Hinterlands of the British Labour Movement’. His latest publication with Barbara in this vein is the co-edited collection Classicising Crisis: the Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire (2021). Earlier publications include the monograph Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (2007), co-written with Barbara Goff, and the collection Thinking the Olympics: the Classical Tradition and the Modern Games (2011), co-edited with Barbara Goff.
In addition to current endeavours specified above, Michael is writing a book designed as an aid and encouragement to new or newly re-engaged readers, tentatively titled ‘Culture Future Perfect: Pandemic Reading and Academic Eng. Lit.’
Michael has previously held research fellowships in the Program in British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Details of his talk on ‘Votes for Medea’, given with Barbara Goff at the CCL on 2 February 2023, can be found at the event’s page and in the post they co-wrote for our blog.
