Michael J Sullivan
Literary critic at University of Oxford, St Catherine's College | Poetics | Transnational drift of verse forms | Digital Humanities & Digital Editing | General Editor, OUP Complete Works of Tennyson.
Views are my own. www.michaeljsullivan.net
- Enjoyed filming this video on Recovery of Literary Manuscripts and our multispectral work on Tennyson and the Shelley Circle. Many thanks to the video team at the University of Oxford! www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvIq... @ox.ac.uk @engfac.bsky.social @oxhumanities.bsky.social @bars.bsky.social
- Fantastic to welcome the new @engfac.bsky.social Master’s groups this year and to begin the course in Material Texts! Wishing you all the best for the year ahead!
- Really enjoyed opening this year’s Tennyson Talks last week, and to see the vibrant international audience the Zoom series is bringing together. #Tennyson #Victorian @tennysonsociety.bsky.social @engfac.bsky.social @bavs-uk.bsky.social
- Much looking forward to speaking in the Tennyson Talks Zoom series on 2 October: ‘“Among a World of Ghosts”: Tennyson’s Texts’. Joining details via the poster @engfac.bsky.social @bavs-uk.bsky.social @navsa.bsky.social
- Excited to have begun a new role for this year leading the courses in material texts for the Oxford Master’s strands in modern literature. Very much looking forward to this role spanning 1830-present, and incorporating new resources and methods both material and digital. @engfac.bsky.social
- Excellent to attend and speak at the British Association of Victorian Studies 25th Anniversary Conference, and to hear its inspiring roundtable from presidents past and future. Isobel Armstrong on the future of the discipline: ‘Be dauntless’. #BAVS2025 @bavs-uk.bsky.social @engfac.bsky.social
- ‘Reading this recovered text helps us to illuminate the creative process behind works of art, but also to restore valuable parts of the world’s cultural heritage’: read full article at doi.org/10.1093/res/... @engfac.bsky.social
- A new project, led by @engfac.bsky.social's Dr @michaeljsullivan.bsky.social, has recovered never before seen text by Alfred Tennyson using a combination of imaging techniques to remove crossings out, marks and ink blots. More info ⬇️
- Delighted to publish 'Reading Behind the Lines', among the first sustained applications of multispectral processing to modern anglophone literature. We recover lost text in Tennyson's manuscripts and theorise its critical implications: doi.org/10.1093/res/... @engfac.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk
- Call for Papers now open for BAVS 25th Anniversary Conference in Oxford. Papers, panels and roundtables are invited on any aspect of the long nineteenth century. 23-25 July, with an ECR event on 22 July – for more details and to submit, see english.web.ox.ac.uk/bavs2025 @engfac.bsky.social
- Excited to have launched our project website for ‘Recovery of Literary of Manuscripts’ at Oxford yesterday. 'Recovery of Literary Manuscripts' is an interdisciplinary project applying multispectral imaging to the study of modern anglophone literature. recovery-of-literary-manuscripts.net
- Since 2021, we’ve been recovering lost variants in modern literature – article forthcoming in The Review of English Studies. We’re developing new techniques to restore lost lines of literary manuscripts, revealing more of the world’s extant literature that has remained beyond the reach of critics.
- Our DH research is informing literary criticism and scholarly editions, including The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson for OUP and work on the Shelley Circle for the Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. @navsa.bsky.social @bars.bsky.social @engfac.bsky.social
- Many thanks to the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory for hosting our research lecture yesterday, where we launched the project website: recovery-of-literary-manuscripts.net #DigitalHumanities #DigitalScholarship @universityofoxford.bsky.social @engfac.bsky.social
- Thrilled to see my article out in The Wordsworth Circle, examining a recently acquired manuscript of ‘The Barberry-Tree’ and disentangling its authorship, philosophy and prosody: doi.org/10.1086/730753
- Excellent time at the Byron Bicentenary event at Cambridge this week — thank you very much to the organisers. @trincolllibcam.bsky.social
- Read the full article open advance access in the OUP journal The Review of English Studies - ‘Sesta Rima as a Mode of Imitation: Hybrid Forms in Anglo-Italian Verse’: academic.oup.com/res/advance-...
- Engaging with the genesis and uses of these stanzas in a range of modern poets, the article forms a case study in experimental stanza switching and hybrid forms in Romantic and post-Romantic verse. @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social @modernistudies.bsky.social
- Drawing together #Byron's Italian reading, his correspondence, and his manuscript experiments, the article opens up a cluster of poems between 1813 and 1816 which reveal how his movements towards ottava rima predate his arrival in Italy and intertwine with the history of sesta rima.
- The research finds in the Italianate form of sesta rima an alternative strand of influence on English ottava rima and casts light on the genesis of Byron’s most celebrated verse form: the ottava rima of Don Juan and Beppo. @modernlanguage.bsky.social @bsecs.bsky.social
- Delighted that my research on the transnational drift of verse forms and the origins of Byron’s ottava rima has just been published by RES. ‘Sesta Rima as a Mode of Imitation: Hybrid Forms in Anglo-Italian Verse’: academic.oup.com/res/advance-... @bars.bsky.social @navsa.bsky.social
