Giles Whiteley Professor

I lecture broadly across all levels at the department.

My research focuses on comparative literature in English, with emphasis on rereading nineteenth-century British literature, as well as reconsidering the philosophical importance and implications of these literary traditions. Within this area, I have a particular interest in the aesthetic and decadent movement, and in their antecedents in Romanticism and afterlives in modernism.

Currently, my major focus is a scholarly edition of Pater’s great late nineteenth-century historical novel, Marius the Epicurean, which will appear as volume two of the new Collected Works of Walter Pater to be published by Oxford University Press.

This work builds on a number of previous publications on Pater, and more broadly on my expertise in aestheticism. My most recent monograph on The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature, 1843-1907 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) discussed the way in which ‘aesthetic’ writers of the nineteenth century engage with space, particularly – although not exclusively – metropolitan space, differentiating between the tropes of theoria and aisthesis in the work of John Ruskin, and following this tradition through Charles Dickens, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Henry James. This work builds on my earlier focus on aestheticism, which produced two monographs, Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death (2010) and Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum (2015), which took seriously Pater's and Wilde's contributions to literary and intellectual history respectively, arguing for the importance of recognising the two as philosophers in their own rights. I continue to publish widely on Pater and Wilde and aestheticism and decadent literature during the fin de siècle. Other recent publications in this vein include a co-edited volume (with Jonathan Foster) on Dickens and Decadence (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). I am also currently at work on two related projects, a co-edited volume on the topic of Henry James and the Visual Arts (with John Scholar) and on Fin du Globe: Reading the Anthropocene, 1880-1920 (with Elisa Bizzotto). I am a former President of the International Walter Pater Society and continue to sit on the board.

My interest in nineteenth-century philosophical traditions also motivated my recent book on Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth Century British Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which focused on the literary reception of the German philosopher during the long-nineteenth century. Beginning with the Romantics and ending with the early modernists, the book discusses a relatively repressed narrative of literary history which spans the entire century and takes in the discourses of literature, philosophy, theology and science. It shows the ways in which Schelling operates as an uncanny spectre underwriting the received narratives of how we have traditionally read the nineteenth century. More work on nineteenth century literature and philosophy includes a multi-volume series on Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Routledge, 2024), for which I acted as general editor, and I am also writing a number of commisioned essays on literature and philosophy in Romantic and Victorian literature.

More broadly, I am interested in comparative literary traditions, in classical reception, in philosophy (with a focus on Greek and Roman philosophy, German philosophy from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and French twenieth-century philosophy), psychoanalysis, humour theory, and textual editing. In addition to my focus on late nineteenth-century literature, I have also published on figures including Shakespeare, Pope and Addison; on the Romanticism of authors such as Coleridge, De Quincey and Southey, as well as German Romanticism; on Victorian authors such as Carlyle and Arnold; on the modernism of writers includuing Mansfield, Woolf and Joyce; and on French writers including Huysmans, Proust and Blanchot.

In 2026, I was elected Fellow of the English Association.