Professor Ross Wilson

Ross is an Official Fellow, one of our Tutors, a Director of Studies in English and an Admissions Tutor in the Arts. He is Professor of the History and Theory of Criticism at the University's Faculty of English. 

Biography

Ross mostly works on poetry since about 1750 and on literary criticism and theory in the same period. He came to Emmanuel as an undergraduate from north Manchester to study Theology in 1997, changed to English after a year, and graduated in 2000. He then went to UCL for a Master's in 2000, before completing a PhD back in Cambridge. After a Research Fellowship and Leverhulme Trust Fellowship at Emmanuel, he took up his first teaching job at the University of East Anglia in 2009, returning to Cambridge in 2013, and promoted to Professor in 2024. Ross has been part of the Emmanuel Fellowship since 2019, and, in his spare time, enjoys gardening, running, and cooking, and is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a heavy metal enthusiast!

Teaching

He teaches literature from 1700, as well as literary and cultural theory on the undergraduate English course. In both the College and University, he has recently taught papers including 'Practical Criticism and Critical Practice'; 'English Literature and its Contexts, 1660–1870'; 'Tragedy; ‘Ethical Imagination'; 'History and Theory of Literary Criticism' and 'Lyric'.

Research

Ross's main interests are in the history and theory of literary criticism, and in poetry from the Romantic period to today. He is currently working on an edition of Percy Shelley's critical prose, an edited volume on the history of Romantic poetry, and an article on Edgar Allan Poe and early nineteenth–century journalism. 

His most recent book is Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750–2020 (OUP, 2023). Recent articles and chapters have addressed the hear/hear homophone in English poetry; balance and persuasion in the work of William Hazlitt; and the criticism of Walter Pater.