John Savarese

Associate Professor; Graduate Officer, English Language & Literature, School of Critical and Creative Humanities
John Savarese

PhD, Rutgers
MA, Rutgers
BA, New York

Extension 43019
Email: john.savarese@uwaterloo.ca

Website 

Biography

I completed my Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 2012, then taught as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley before coming to Waterloo in 2014. My research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, the history of science, and questions of form and genre. My bookRomanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability(Ohio State UP, 2020) examines how Romantic poets, collectors, and antiquarians reimagined what it meant to have a mind in the first place, and to live in a social environment populated by other minds. In my more recent work, I have been looking at how those interdisciplinary conversations play out in the gothic tradition. I have also been researching the relationship between poetry, popular song, and sonic environments.

Selected publications

Books

Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability,  The Ohio State University Press (2020).

Edited Collection

“Romanticism and Vision,” special issue co-edited with Terry F. Robinson, European Romantic Review 33.4 (2022).

Articles and Chapters

“Joanna Baillie and the Science of Song,” forthcoming in Women’s Writing.

“Mind and Cognition in Nineteenth-Century Literature,” forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Literature and Science, edited by Anne Dewitt, Oxford University Press.

“Romantic Minstrelsy,” forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Scott, edited by Ian Duncan, Cambridge University Press.

“Gothic Ecologies of Mind,” in Romanticism and Consciousness Revisited, edited by Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha, Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Romanticism and Vision, edited with Terry F. Robinson, special issue ofEuropean Romantic Review 33.4 (2022).

Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability, The Ohio State University Press, 2020.

“Cognitive Scaffolding, Aids to Reflection,” in Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, ed. Miranda Anderson, George Rousseau, and Michael Wheeler (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) pp 139-155.

“Baillie’s Diagnostic Sublime,” European Romantic Review 29.3 (June 2018) pp 409-419.

Fellowships & Awards

  • UW/SSHRC Explore Grant, 2020-2022
  • American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellowship
  • Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Texas at Austin

Current research

I’m currently at work on a book-length project about the idea of the gothic mind. Gothic writing often looks in two directions at once: inward, toward the underlying psychology of fear, superstition, or the sublime; and outward, to the material culture that mediates inner life.As a result, the gothic sometimes frames cognition in universalizing ways, but also recognizes the ways mental functioning is embedded in cultural and material history. I am also working on a few projects that bring together literature, media history, and sound studies, including a project about field recording as a gothic media practice; and a series of essays about Romanticism’s soundscapes (ecological, industrial, and musical)

Areas of graduate supervision

  • Literary history and theory

  • Romanticism; 18th- and 19th-century literature

  • Gothic and horror studies

  • Literature and science