Dr Madeleine Callaghan
School of English
Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature
+44 114 222 8461
Full contact details
School of English
2.24
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
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I joined the School of English in September 2010 and I am a senior lecturer in Romantic Literature. My primary research interest is the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. I also have research interests in other Romantic poets and prose writers, such as Keats, Landon, and Hemans, and in twentieth-century British and Irish poetry.
I read English at Durham University and stayed in Durham for my Masters and PhD (where I was supervised by Professor Michael O'Neill). My first monograph, entitled Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays, came out in 2017, and my second monograph, entitled The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley, came out in 2019. With Michael O’Neill, I co-edited Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (2011), and we also co-authored The Romantic Poetry Handbook (2018). I co-edited Romanticism and the Letter with Anthony Howe in 2020. My most recent book is Eternity in British Romantic Poetry (2022).
My work is interested in poetry and poetics, with particular emphasis upon close reading, the intersection between philosophy and poetry, Romantic literature as a whole, and the question of the poet-Romantic presence in twentieth-century poetry. I am currently editing the new 21st Century Oxford Authors edition of Shelley's work for Oxford University Press, and I am working as an associate editor on the Johns Hopkins University Press edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
- Qualifications
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PhD: Durham University (“The Life We Image: Chaos and Control in the Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats”)
MA in English Literary Studies (Durham University)
BA in English Studies (Durham University)
- Research interests
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My primary area of interest is Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and I have written extensively about the poetry of the Romantic period, particularly on Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. I also have research interests in Milton, Coleridge, and in post-war British, American, and Irish poetry, particularly that of Louis MacNeice and John Berryman. My work has been published in journals such as ELH, the Review of English Studies, the Keats-Shelley Journal, Studies in Romanticism, and many others. I have published three monographs, and co-written and edited a further four books.
I have supervised PhD students across a variety of subject areas, including upon quest in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, on Shelley and Keats's influence upon Wilfred Owen, on pleasure and pain in the work of John Keats, androgyny in the work of Shelley, on the pastoral in Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry, and on the relationship between Byron and Hemans' poetry. I am also part of supervisory teams working globally, from the University of South Carolina (on negative epistemology in British Romantic poetry) to Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (the Theatrical Byron). I would welcome supervisory enquires from people interested in working upon Romantic or post-Romantic poetry.
My new project is to prepare a new edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s work for the 21st Century Oxford Authors series. In 2024, I took up the the Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Visiting Fellowship at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University to support the edition. This new edition will present selections of the poetry, drama, letters, and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley for twenty-first century readers: scholars, postgraduates, undergraduates, and the general reader. This new edition provides a new breadth of selected poetry, detailed transcription, and comprehensively annotated texts, for which research in the Bodleian Special Collections is essential. It will contain newly edited versions of the selected texts and reveal the range and diversity of Shelley’s career as a poet, reading Shelley as a multi-faceted artist whose work spans a plethora of genres, themes, and concepts, and thus re-orientating readers’ understanding of Shelley from single issue interpretations.
Eternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. This monograph will offer an original approach to Romanticism that demonstrates the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the period: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The aims of the project are two-fold: firstly, to analyse the prevalence and range of images of eternity (from apocalypse, and afterlife, to transcendence) in Romantic poetry; secondly, in opening up a new and more nuanced focus on how Romantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity, it challenges the assumption that the Romantic age should be considered through a contextual rather than a conceptual lens.I have also enjoyed media work. In 2025, I was part of the Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks documentary (BBC), and have appeared on Sir Tony Robinson's Cunningcast (2023) to discuss Christina Rossetti's poetry for the Christmas special. In 2022, I featured on BBC Radio 4's programme with Benjamin Zephaniah on Percy Shelley: Reformer and Radical.
- Publications
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Books
- Eternity in British Romantic Poetry. Liverpool University Press.
- The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley. London: Anthem Press.
- The Romantic Poetry Handbook. John Wiley & Sons.
- Shelley’s living artistry: Letters, poems, plays (Introduction and chapters 5 and 8). Liverpool University Press. View this article in WRRO
- Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. Wiley-Blackwell.
Edited books
- Romanticism and the Letter. Springer International Publishing.
- The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Journal articles
- Byron as others. The Byron Journal, 52(1), 65-80. View this article in WRRO
- How poetry knows. The Wordsworth Circle, 55(1), 89-108. View this article in WRRO
- Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hardy: The Inheritance of Loss. ELH: English Literary History, 91(1), 181-206. View this article in WRRO
- Florence as Muse : Byron and Shelley’s Tuscan Competition. European Romantic Review, 34(6), 689-710. View this article in WRRO
- Teaching Byron and Shelley to sing: Thomas Moore’s lyric example. Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 23. View this article in WRRO
- Shelley’s poet-birds. Essays in Criticism, 73(1), 30-52. View this article in WRRO
- What can the romantic lyric do?. Textual Practice, 37(12), 1981-1999. View this article in WRRO
- Writing “Supreme Reality”: Coleridge’s religious musings and Shelley’s Queen Mab. Studies in Romanticism, 61(3), 405-427. View this article in WRRO
- Byron and his twentieth century poetic legacy : Yeats, Auden, Berryman. The Review of English Studies, 72(307), 955-973.
- Shelley's excursion. SEL Studies in English Literature, 60(4), 717-737. View this article in WRRO
- “The artifice of eternity”: The Wanderings of Oisin and the Byzantium poems. Irish Studies Review, 27(2), 177-194. View this article in WRRO
- Shelley in Eternity. Essays in Criticism, 68(3), 308-326. View this article in WRRO
- The Poetic. COUNTERTEXT-A JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE POST-LITERARY, 3(2), 209-210.
- ‘Chosen Comrades’: Yeats’s Romantic Rhymes. Romanticism, 23(2), 155-165. View this article in WRRO
- Byron and Shelley’s Poetry of 1816. The Wordsworth Circle, 48(1), 26-32. View this article in WRRO
- Laon and Cythna. Keats-Shelley Journal, 66, 186-187.
- Forms of conflict: Byron's influence on Yeats. English, 64(245), 81-98. View this article in WRRO
- Shelley and the Ambivalence of Idealism. Keats-Shelley Journal, 64, 92-104. View this article in WRRO
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Nancy Moore Goslee , Shelley's Visual Imagination, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. vii + 275. £55.00 hardback. 9781107008380.. Romanticism, 19(2), 220-221.
- Romantic 'Anglo-Italians': Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle. KEATS-SHELLEY REVIEW, 26(1), 75-77.
- Shelley's Music: Fantasy, Authority, and the Object Voice. KEATS-SHELLEY REV(26), 181-182.
- The Poetics of Perception in Southey's The Curse of Kehama and Byron's The Giaour. WORDSWORTH CIRCLE, 42(1), 38-41.
- 'His mute voice': The two heroes of Adonais. Keats Shelley Review, 24, 38-52.
- The Struggle with Language in Byron's 'Cain'. The Byron Journal, 38(2), 125-134.
Book chapters
- 'I ne'er mistake you for a personal foe': Byron and Wordsworth In Bucknell C & Ward M (Ed.), Byron Among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy (pp. 131-144). Cambridge University Press View this article in WRRO
- Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the Limits of Letters, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (pp. 183-198). Springer International Publishing
- Introduction : Romanticism and the letter In Callaghan M & Howe A (Ed.), Romanticism and the Letter (pp. 1-14). Palgrave Macmillan View this article in WRRO
- Gothic Romanticism and the Summer of 1816, The Cambridge History of the Gothic (pp. 19-40). Cambridge University Press
- The Lake Poets In Tuite C (Ed.), Byron in Context (pp. 190-196). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Letters In O'Neill M (Ed.), John Keats in Context (pp. 66-74). Cambridge University Press View this article in WRRO
- ‘Strong Ghosts’: Romantic Presences in Yeats’s Poetry, Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (pp. 27-42). Routledge
- 'Any thing human or earthly': Shelley's letters and poetry, Letter Writing Among Poets from William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop (pp. 111-125).
- Louis MacNeice and the Struggle for Romantic Identity, Legacies of Romanticism (pp. 149-164). Routledge
- Louis MacNeice and the Struggle for Romantic Identity In Casaliggi C & March-Russell P (Ed.), The Legacies of Romanticism Routledge
- ‘Strong Ghosts’: Romantic Presences in Yeats’s Poetry In Sandy M (Ed.), Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (pp. 27-42). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..
- Shelley and Milton In Callaghan M, O'Neill M & Howe A (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (pp. 478-494). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- What More is There to Say ? Yeats’s Questions In Bonapfel EM, Faulkner M, Gutierrez J & Lennard J (Ed.), A History of Punctuation in English Literature [three volumes]
Presentations
- “Byron and Shelley in 1816.”. New York Public Library.
- Eternity in British Romantic Poetry. Liverpool University Press.
- Research group
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I supervise and have been primary supervisor for several successful doctoral theses. These include work on Keats and pleasure and pain (funded by the Wolfson Foundation), Percy Bysshe Shelley and androgyny, pastoral poetry in the Romantic period, the second-generation Romantic poets and quest (AHRC funded) and a thesis on Owen and the Romantic elegiac tradition (funded by WRoCAH), as well as secondary supervising a number of other projects. I am interested in supervising PhD candidates in any of my research interests, especially in Romantic or post-Romantic poetry.
- Teaching interests
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My research and teaching interests are closely related. I teach on the English Literature BA course and the Masters programme. I lecture across a numbers of periods and movements, from Milton to Auden, and I enjoy having the opportunity to lecture about the poetry, philosophy, and culture of the Romantic period and beyond.
Modules that I contribute to at undergraduate level include the core module, 'Romanticism to Modernism', which I often run, and 'The Invention of Romanticism', and my approved module, 'Life After Death? Romantic Poets and Writing the Afterlife'.
- Teaching activities
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My research and teaching interests are closely related. I teach on the English Literature BA course and various Masters programmes. Modules that I contribute to at undergraduate level include "Romanticism to Modernism,” “The Invention of Romanticism,” plus my approved module for finalists, “Life After Death? Romantic Poets and Writing the Afterlife”
At postgraduate level, I am a member of the teaching team for various courses on the Masters degree, and co-convene (with Dr Anna Barton) two modules, "Love and Lyric" and "I want a hero: Romantic and Victorian Epic."
- Professional activities and memberships
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I serve as Joint President (UK and Europe) of the International Association of Byron Societies.
I am a reviewer for Canadian Research Council (SSHRC grants) (2024-ongoing) and the Irish Research Council (AHSS) where I evaluate allocated PhD and postdoctoral funding applications (2016 to ongoing).
I am a member of the British Association of Romantic Studies, the Modern Languages Association, the Newstead Abbey Byron Society, and the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
I am a peer reviewer for a number of journals and presses, such as Oxford University Press; Routledge; Romanticism; Orbis Litterarum; Irish Studies Review; Bloomsbury; Keats-Shelley Review; Studies in Romanticism; Review of English Studies; European Romantic Review; the Byron Journal; Religion and Literature; Intellectual History Review, and PMLA.
I am a member of the UKRI Talent Peer Review College (PRC).
- Professional Activities and Recognition
I have considerable public speaking experience and have been invited to speak as a keynote lecturer at many events. These include plenary lectures at the New York Public Library (2016), the Wordsworth Summer Conference (2018, 2026), and Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (2023). Beyond the academy, these include the Byron Society (2016), the Off the Shelf Festival (2019, 2022), BBC Radio 4 (2022), and a documentary, Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, with BBC Arts on J. M. W. Turner (2025).
To support my research on the new 21st Century Oxford Authors edition of Shelley's work for Oxford University Press, I was awarded the Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Fellowship in English Literature (a Bodleian Visiting Fellowship: 15 January to 8 March 2024).