Jim Carson, who began his academic career at Kenyon in 1988, is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism. In addition to teaching at Kenyon, he held a visiting appointment at Stanford University, where he taught courses in the Restoration and eighteenth century. He is the author of "Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel." His current research focuses on animals, especially dogs, in the Romantic period. His scholarly work has been supported by a Huntington/British Academy Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library and an American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Short-Term Fellowship at the Clark Library at UCLA. He was the initial holder of the William P. Rice Chair in English and Literature (2012-2015).

Jim served a four-year term as English Department chair and directed the honors program on three occasions. He has taken a particular interest in college service, chairing several committees of the faculty: the Curricular Policy Committee, Faculty Affairs Committee and Resource Allocation and Assessment Subcommittee. For this work, he received the Kenyon College Distinguished Faculty Service Award in 2007.

Education

1986 — Doctor of Philosophy from Univ. of California Berkeley

1979 — Master of Arts from Univ British Columbia

1975 — Bachelor of Arts from University of Alberta

Courses Recently Taught

Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered every year.

This course focuses on the lyric poetry of the Romantic period, from William Cowper to John Keats. We also consider criticism, autobiographical writing, essays and novels by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Keats. In this course, we investigate two central claims: first, that Romantic poetry is not simply nature poetry but rather philosophical poetry about the interrelationship between natural objects and the human subject; and second that Romanticism develops a notion of aesthetic autonomy out of very specific political and historical engagements. This counts toward the 1700-1900 requirement for the major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

This course introduces the “rise of the novel” thesis articulated by Ian Watt (“The Rise of the Novel,” 1957) that has been central to 18th-century studies but has since been challenged and revised in the field. Alongside theoretical readings in the history and theory of the novel, we read different forms of the 18th-century novel (the “true history,” the picaresque, the novel of manners, the bildungsroman, the travel narrative, the gothic) while situating them in their material, social and political contexts. What constitutes a novel, and what is novel about the novel? What is the novel’s relationship to other genres and forms? This course is reading-intensive, engaging with both primary texts and secondary texts, the latter of which involve not only critical interpretations of novels but also theories of genre and reading. This course prepares students to think about the novel historically and theoretically. Course assignments develop close-reading skills and ability to produce well-supported, nuanced arguments that intervene in larger scholarly conversations. This counts toward the 1700-1900 requirement for the major.