Sophie Thomas

My research explores the crosscurrents between visual culture, material culture, and literary texts. I publish on a variety of topics related to Romanticism, museums, and visual media, most recently co-editing the Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts and a special issue of Museum and Society, “On the Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and the Objects of the Museum.” I am currently completing a book on objects, collections and museums in the Romantic period (The Romantic Museum, 1770 – 1830: Matter, Memory, and the Poetics of Things) and working on a new SSHRC-funded project on Romanticism, museums, and the poetics of sculpture.

Recent publications

The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts, co-edited with Maureen McCue (EUP, 2023).

“Playing ‘Alive’: Performing Sculpture on the Romantic Stage,” The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre, ed. Terry Robinson and Diane Piccitto (University of Michigan Press, 2023), pp. 159-181.

“The Self-Contained Museum: Romanticism, Collecting, and the Space of Writing,” Museums in Literature: Fictionalising museums, world exhibitions, and private collections, ed. Caroline Marie and Anne Chassagnol (Museums in Literature, Brepols, 2022), pp. 28-44.

“John Soane’s Sarcophagus,” Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition (RÊVE). Posted 4 June, 2021. http://www.euromanticism.org/john-soanes-sarcophagus/#more-1914

“‘With a master’s hand and prophet’s fire’: Blake’s Illustrations for ‘The Bard,’” Romanticism and Illustration, ed. Susan Matthews and Ian Haywood (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 47-69.

“A ‘strange and mixed assemblage’: Sir John Soane, Archivist of the Self,” Studies in Romanticism 57:1 (Spring, 2018), pp. 121-142.

“Word and Image,” The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 625-642.

“Pompeii, the Body, and the Imprint of the Ancient World,” Word & Image 33:3 (September, 2017), pp. 303-312.

“Collecting, Cultural Memory, and the Regency Museum,” Regency Revisited, ed. Tim Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra (Palgrave, 2016), pp. 159-175.

“Collection, Exhibition, and Evolution: The Romantic Museum,” in Romantic Evolutions, ed. Joshua Lambier and Joel Faflak. Literature Compass 13/10 (2016) pp. 681-690. (Wiley Online Library) http://literature-compass.com/romanticism/

“Painting, Spectacle, and the Visual,” William Wordsworth in Context, ed. Andrew Bennett (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 300-307.

“Feather Cloaks and English Collectors: Cook’s Voyages and the Objects of the Museum,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture,” ed. Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu (Ashgate, 2013), pp. 69-87.

“Visual Culture,” Handbook to Romanticism Studies, ed. Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright (Blackwell, 2012), pp. 87-103.

“Displaying Egypt: Archaeology, Spectacle, and the Museum in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The Nineteenth Century Archaeological Imagination, ed. Alex Warwick and Martin Willis. Special issue of Journal of Literature and Science 5:1 (Fall, 2012), pp. 6-22.

Special Journal Issues:

Museum and Society, Vol. 17:3 (November, 2019). Guest edited, with Janine Rogers: “On the Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and the Objects of the Museum.” https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/index

Romanticism on the Net (RoN), Vol. 70 (Spring, 2018). Guest edited issue on the theme of “Recollecting the Nineteenth-Century Museum.” https://ronjournal.org/articles/n70/

Sample of supervised ComCult projects:

2017 - Erin McCurdy; Dissertation: Where flesh meets bone: dance in the modern art museum

2015 - Stephanie Rogerson; Dissertation: Without Words You Spoke: Queer Representation, Early Photography and Feeling