English

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud

Cohen-Vrignaud UTK English

Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies

312 McClung Tower
gerard@utk.edu

Biography

Professor Cohen-Vrignaud’s research focuses on Romanticism and its relation to political energies (revolutions, parliamentary reform, mass activism). His first book, Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism (Cambridge UP), reconsidered the crosscultural poetics of Byron, the Shelleys, and reformers in light of the liberal politics and economics shaking up Britain after the French Revolution. His current project, Generic Politics, examines how Romantic political life and social conflict were shaped by the genres and pleasures of literary and visual culture. Many of his articles can be found here.

Professor CV’s teaching focuses on poetry (Romantic and beyond), the Gothic, Jane Austen, politics and literature, queer theory, gender studies, and affect theory. Writing by graduate students in the latter courses has populated a WordPress site in affect theory, “Affectsphere.”

Professor CV’s work has been funded by the Fulbright Program (Morocco), the University of Tennessee Humanities Center, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Mellon Foundation.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
  • B.A. in Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

Publications

  • “Hopeless Romanticism,” Shelley for our Times, ed. Omar Miranda and Kate Singer (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
  • “Love Actually: On Affect Theory and Romantic Studies,” The Wordsworth Circle 51 (Summer 2020) 300-21.
  • Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
  • “Rhyme’s Crimes,” ELH 82.3 (Fall 2015) 987-1012.
  • “Capitalism’s Wishful Thinking,” Modern Language Quarterly 76.2 (June 2015) 181-99.
  • “Beyond the Pale: Edwin Drood and the ‘Sanctity of Human Life,’” Dickens Studies Annual 46 (2015) 277-96.
  • “Byron and Oriental Love,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 68.1 (June 2013) 1-32.
  • “On Octopussies, or the Anatomy of Female Power,” differences 23:1 (Spring 2012) 32-61.
  • “Becoming Corsairs: Byron, British Property Rights and Orientalist Economics,” Studies in Romanticism 50:4 (Winter 2011) 685-714.