Carmen Faye Mathes earned her PhD in English Literature at the University of British Columbia (dir. Miranda Burgess). Her research areas are eighteenth and nineteenth century literature and culture with an emphasis on European Romanticism. Her book project, Pivotal Modernity, argues that Romantic writers use formal “dissonances” to draw attention to the undesirability of the status quo by emphasizing that predictable aesthetic experiences, however reassuring readers may find them, can be politically undesirable and ethically disabling. In addition to the history of aesthetics, form and feeling, her interests include the British response to global events and interchanges, the Haitian revolution, affect theory and the embodied subject. Carmen’s essay, “‘Let us not therefore go hurrying about’: Towards an Aesthetics of Passivity in Keats’s Poetics,” won the Outstanding Student Essay Award at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism’s 2013 annual conference, and was subsequently published in European Romantic Review (2014). She has another essay in European Romantic Review (2017) on William Wordsworth, the Haitian Revolution, and the radical materiality of sound, and has written book reviews for Romantic Circles Praxis (2016), Studies in Romanticism (Spring 2016), and Modern Philology (2017).

Arts Studies Research and Writing |ASTU|ASTU 100|101

Individual & Society; PPE