Personal profile
Research overview
I'm an Associate Lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature, with interests that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I'm currently working on a book on abolitionist poetry, with particular focus on how the drive to write political verse in the abolitionist period contributed to the poetic formal diversity we associate with Romanticism.
Current work includes essays on William Cowper's blank verse, the perceived relation of rhyme to commercial cultiure in the eighteenth century, and the uses of the 'unheroic' form of the anapaestic tetrameter couplet in antislavery poetry. I'm increasingly interested in Cowper, and will be contributing an essay (on 'Abolitionist Writings') to the Oxford Handbook to William Cowper.
I've published broadly on poetic form and formal history, including essays on rhyme and rhythm in figures like Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Mary Robinson, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson. I've published dedicated essays on writers as far back as Pope, and as close to the present as Elif Batuman.
Publications
Books
—Philosophical Connections: Akenside, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
—George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Biography
I received my B.A. from the University of Exeter, and my M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where I also taught for four years. I took up the role of Research Fellow in the School of English in September 2023, and began a stint as Associate Lecturer in 2025, but I was previously a visiting Fleeman Fellow in St Andrews in 2018.
Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
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SDG 5 Gender Equality
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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
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Taking poetry seriously: abolitionism and the unheroic couplet
Townsend, C., 11 Dec 2025, (E-pub ahead of print) In: English Literary History. 92, 4, p. 1019-1048Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open Access -
The British empiricists
Townsend, C., 1 Apr 2025, Percy Shelley in context. Wilson, R. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 165-171 (Literature in context (Cambridge University Press)).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
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Poetic injustice: blank-verse abolitionism and Cowper's The Task
Townsend, C., 21 Aug 2024, In: European Romantic Review. 35, 3, p. 495-510 16 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile -
Semblances of truth: the romantic lyric revisited
Townsend, C., 1 Jan 2024, In: Literature Compass. 21, 1-3, 14 p., e12702.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile -
Verse and voice in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
Townsend, C., 1 Nov 2024, In: Modern Philology. 122, 2, p. 263-285 23 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review