Theresa Kelley

Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor
608-263-3824
tkelley@wisc.edu

Degrees and Institutions

MA and PhD, Northwestern University, 1973 and 1977
BA University of Washington, 1965

Research Interests

Romanticism, poetics, genre theory, crossdisciplinary studies in art, philosophy, culture, empire and the history and philosophy of science.

Selected Publications

Recent essays: “Romantic Botany: Material Culture—Poetic Figure”in The Commerce of Literature and Natural History, Ed. Noah Herringman and Amy King. SUNY Press, 2003. 221-52; "Romanticism Bites Back: Adorno and Romantic Natural History", European Romantic Review, 15:2 (2004):193-204; “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 59: 3 (2004): 281-314; and forthcoming essays on Mary and Percy Shelley, Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno in ELH and Studies in Romanticism, and "Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity", ed. Richter.

Books: Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics (1988), Romantic Women Writers, co-edited with Paula Feldman (1995); Reinventing Allegory (1997, winner of the South Central Modern Language Association Book Award).

Current Projects

She is currently writing Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture, for which she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Henry E. Hungtington Library and Art Gallery. As its title indicates, this book explores hidden and explicit relations between botanical theory and practice and Romantic literary and philosophical culture, with sustained notice of the problem of taxonomy as a specific manifestation of Romanticism's broader anxieties about knowledge and epistemological control. Its topics include Erasmus Darwin on the sexuality of plants; Charles Darwin on orchid fertilization; Romantic poets on botany; German philosophical thinking about Romantic poets on botany; German philosophical thinking about plant and human life; problems in taxonomy and botanical classification, and colonial botanical art in British India.

She is currently editing a collection of essays, commissioned and forthcoming, on the topic of Romantic Difference. Arguing that difference is pervasive across Romanticism and characteristic as well of recent critical debates between philosophical and cultural-historical readings, this collection presents speakers from both sides of this debate.

Co-Director with Richard Sha for an on-line gallery project that will focus on Romantic visual culture, to be housed at Romantic Circles. With able research assistance of graduate students in English at UW-Madison, this Gallery will feature fully indexable and searchable entries on numerous aspects of Romantic visual culture.

Together with other UW colleagues, Theresa Kelley has begun a new, cross-disciplinary group: Middle Modernity, 1760-1910, that concerns itself with British culture and thought throughout this key moment in the onset of modernity. Faculty colleagues in Middle Modernity include: Lynn Festa, Sara Guyer, Susan Bernstein, Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Eric Rothstein and Nancy Marshall (Art History).