George Adams

My doctoral project, provisionally titled ‘Particularity, ecology, and life in British Romantic-period writing, 1790-1830’, examines the role of particularity as a form of ecological attention towards the biosphere. It considers how Romantic-period writers use particularity, defined in Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) as a form of ‘distinct notice or enumeration’, to parse and fashion ‘many different and often competing natures’ (Alan Bewell). I ask how a select group of writers – John Clare, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley – think ecologically through their poetry, letters, and prose journals; how they observe and articulate the textures, scales, and agencies of different creatures, plants, and weather conditions, and how their strategies of feeling extend beyond the scale of human experience towards the animate ‘life of things’. This project is co-funded by the OOC-AHRC-DTP and a Vice Chancellor’s Award.

I completed a BA in English Language and Literature at Oxford (2023, First Class), followed by the MSt in English 1700-1830 as a Clarendon Scholar (2024, Distinction). I then studied for a Foundation Diploma in Fine and Applied Art in London, before coming to Cambridge to start my PhD at the Faculty of English, supervised by Professor Ross Wilson.