Research

Theresa Kelley is at present writing Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture, which appropriates Linnaeus’s term for the Cryptogamia, the class of plants in which the reproductive parts are hidden from view, to describe the role of botany in Romantic culture as both a scientific inquiry and a critical component of Romantic thinking about the kingdoms of nature, including the human.  Its argument ranges widely across the period, taking in Romantic poetics, botanical illustration, taxonomic and philosophical considerations of singularity and species, botanical discovery and imperial schemes, plants that cause trouble of various kinds and, threaded through all of these, the signifying work of botanical figures and figurative language.   

Her other project is editing a commissioned group of essays that address the role of difference in Romantic writing.  Contributors to this volume variously understand difference as having to do with historical and material difference and with difference itself as the renewing philosophical ground of Romantic thought and writing.  Romantic Differences both renders the differences between these critical perspectives and suggests points of crossover between them in Romantic writing and cultural performance.

Theresa M. Kelley is Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Washington and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University. She has written widely on aspects of Romanticism, the late eighteenth century aesthetics and philosophy, and critical theory. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Texas, University of Wisconsin–Madison and its Institute for Research in the Humanities. She has written widely on aspects of Romanticism, the late eighteenth century aesthetics and philosophy, and modern critical theory and philosophy. She is author of Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge 1988), co-editor of Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (New England 1995), and Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge 1997), winner of the 1998 award for best scholarly book published in 1997 given by the South Central Modern Language Association.