Matthew C. Borushko
Professor of English
Biography
My scholarly interests include the literature of the Romantic Age in Britain (1789-1832); poetry and poetics; the work of Bob Dylan; and the literature and culture of sports. In both my teaching and my research, I explore the relationship of the aesthetic to forms of the political, the social, and the historical, thereby seeking to enable dialogue across disciplines and historical periods.
I am currently working several projects. The first, Shelley's Romantic Nonviolence: Aesthetics and Politics in an Age of Revolution, establishes a relationship between Shelley's imagining of a politics of nonviolence and his theory and practice of art. Selections from this project have appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal in 2010, Studies in Romanticism in 2013, and European Romantic Review in 2017. A second project, Romanticism Against History, reads the Romantic movement in Britain as a critique of the emergent forms of history and historical understanding in post-Enlightenment Europe. An essay drawn from this project appeared in ELH: the essay concerns the Ismail cantos of Byron's Don Juan.
Education
- Ph.D., Boston University
- B.A., University of Michigan
Selected Publications, Articles & Awards
EDITED VOLUMES
The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form. Romantic Circles Praxis Series (October 2015).
ESSAYS
“Perils of the Sublime: Ideology in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Alastor.’” European Romantic Review 28.5 (2017): 643-658. Link.
“Aesthetics of Nonviolence: Shelley, Adorno, Rancière.” The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form, ed. Matthew C. Borushko, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (October 2015). Link.
“History, Historicism, and Agency at Byron’s Ismail.” ELH 81:1 (Spring 2014). Link.
“The Politics of Subreption: Resisting the Sublime in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc.’” Studies in Romanticism 52: 2 (Summer 2013): 225-252.
“Violence and Nonviolence in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy.” Keats-Shelley Journal LIX (2010): 93-113.
“‘A nation or a world’: Patriotism in Shelley.” Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empires, Bodies, Rhetoric, ed. Orrin N. C. Wang, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (May 2005). Link.
“Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Sciences.” Literature Compass 2 (2005): 1-6. Link.
Annual Essay Prize, Keats-Shelley Association of America, 2013: awarded for "The Politics of Subreption: Resisting the Sublime in Shelley's 'Mont Blanc.'"
Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Grant, Keats-Shelley Association of America, 2013.