Jim Carson came to Kenyon in 1988, as a specialist in eighteenth-century literature, Romanticism, and literary criticism and theory. In addition to teaching at Kenyon, he held a visiting appointment at Stanford University, where he taught courses in the Restoration and eighteenth century. The author of Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, he is currently working on a book about real dogs and animal metaphors in the Romantic period. His research 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 served a four-year term as English department chair, and three times served as director of the Honors Program. He has taken a particular interest in library issues: coordinating collection development for the English Department, chairing the Library and Technology Subcommittee, and serving as a member of the search committee for the Vice-President for Library and Information Services.

Education

Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley
M.A. University of British Columbia
B.A. University of Alberta

Selected Publications

"Scott and the Romantic Dog." The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.4 (December 2010): 647-61. (In the special issue entitled "Animals in the Eighteenth Century," edited by Glynis Ridley.)

Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

"'The Little Republic' of the Family: Goldsmith's Politics of Nostalgia." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16: 2 (Jan. 2004): 173-96.

"Enlightenment, Popular Culture, and Gothic Fiction." In the Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 255-76.

"Britons, 'Hottentots,' Plantation Slavery, and Tobias Smollett." Philological Quarterly 75: 4 (Fall 1996), 471-99.

Courses Taught

ENGL 103/104 Animals in Literature
ENGL 103/104 Monsters and Monstrosity
ENGL 103/104 The Crowd in Literature and Film
ENGL 251 Studies in British Romantic Literature
ENGL 342 The Eighteenth-Century Novel
ENGL 351 British Romantic Literature
ENGL 453 Jane Austen