Research
My scholarship explores the foundations of the modern literary humanities, in particular the overlapping ambitions of literary criticism and the humanistic social sciences as they bear on an expanding British Empire. I am specialist of eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, though I maintain additional interests in modern visual culture, especially photography and film, contemporary poetry, and philosophical approaches to literary study.
My first book, The Historical Poem: On the Lives and Afterlives of Romantic Literary Criticism, will be published by Stanford University Press in March 2026.
You can find more information about my book, essays and reviews, and future projects below.
Description
The Historical Poem takes up Georg Lukács’s classic account of the historical novel to tell the forgotten story of its precursors. For eighteenth-century and Romantic thinkers, these were poems from distant times and places—from ancient and medieval India to the Christian and Islamic Middles Ages. Historical poems were said to bring the past to life, to invite their readers into distant worlds. And they were made to answer many of the era’s most pressing philosophical questions: the nature of human thought, the origin of human civilizations, the formation—and, for some, the hierarchy—of races.
In this wide-ranging and innovative study, Joel Childers traces what he calls enterpretation, a hermeneutics of inhabitation and historical feeling. At a time of rapid imperial expansion, Childers shows how enterpretation was used to conceive of a newly human history—an account of the peopling of the globe as an uneven process of migration, conquest, and settlement.
At once a literary history and a critical intervention, The Historical Poem combines a detailed study of Romantic thought with chapters on twentieth-century and contemporary literary criticism by Fredric Jameson, Saidiya Hartman, and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, among others.
Reviews
“With its new analysis of the formation of modern literary criticism, this capacious and elegant book places Enlightenment and Romantic genre criticism and poetry at the origin of 20th- and 21st-century debates about philology, world literatures, and settler colonialism. A marvelous debut."
—Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley
“Working with a wide array of writers—some unjustly neglected—Childers's book is at once informative and innovative, and will be welcomed by everyone with an interest in the deep and complex histories informing critical debates in literary history.”
—Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge
Essays and Reviews
Essays Published or Forthcoming
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This essay is about a forgotten episode in the history of allegorical interpretation: the translation and reception of Sanskrit literature by British Orientalists at the turn of the nineteenth century as a “dark and intricate labyrinth.” It is also, more broadly, about the production of historical knowledge through textual criticism as it bears upon that cultural process in the Middle Ages known as translatio imperii et studii—the transfer of power and knowledge. Its central premise is that we can observe during the British East India Company’s conquest of Bengal a transformation in the political and anthropological functions of allegoresis—an interpretive method, from its first recorded uses in debates on Greek poetry, for asserting the emergence or relevance of what might be called most simply worldviews: cosmological, theological, metaphysical, and otherwise.
Modern Philology (November 2025)
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This essay argues for the centrality of romance to our ideas of literary history from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. It considers the enduring appeal of this form in enabling critics to do two things at once: conceive of history as a social totality, registered across time in the felt language of poetry, and attend to the particularities of time and place in which any given romance is written. With special attention to scholarship of the so-called romance revival, this essay demonstrates the importance of romance to narratives of racial identity and difference, above all to an eighteenth-century vision of history as propelled by (settler) colonial violence. It queries what role these narratives have in our own ongoing romance of criticism.
New Literary History (Winter 2021)
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The idea of love is central to the works of Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre. For both it is the desire to possess the consciousness of the other—an impossible ideal. Despite Sartre’s own admissions, scholars have failed to note the similarities between the two authors. In this essay, I argue that Sartre’s reading of the novel—both the period in which he read it and the method he employs in interpreting it—illustrates Proust’s influence on his thinking and offers a new approach to the study of the Recherche.
Philosophy and Literature (October 2013)
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This essay is about the life and work of the British artist and gay rights activist, Derek Jarman, in the early 1980s. It focuses on his short film Home Thoughts, produced during a trip to the Soviet Union, amid the onset of the AIDS epidemic.
Los Angeles Review of Books (forthcoming)
Essays in Progress
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This essay is part of an upcoming critical roundtable discussion in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation on the topic, “Land as Method.” It considers the relationship, in the 1760s, between an emergent literary criticism that views works of art as inhabitable spaces and regimes of colonialism in the Atlantic and South Asia.
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An experiment in literary criticism, this essay considers John Gay’s 1729 comic opera Polly—the supressed sequel to his wildly popular Beggar’s Opera—in light of contemporary artist Stan Douglas’s exhibition The Enemy of All Mankind (2024), a series of nine photographs depicting scenes from Gay’s opera. This essay places special emphasis on the portrayal of Maroon societies, as well as the sexual politics of plantation culture, in early colonial Jamaica.
Book Reviews
Modern Archaism
I am currently at work on my second book, tentatively called Modern Archaism: Media and the Performance of History. This book, inspired by my undergraduate teaching, extends my interests in the phenomenologies of historical feeling to a set of writers and filmmakers for whom obsolete or outmoded aesthetic form offers a way to disrupt normative claims of belonging—to land, communities, and modes of thought. From Enlightenment forgeries and Romanticism’s “distressed genres” to twentieth- and twenty-first century queer mixed media artists like Derek Jarman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Caroline Bergvall, this book traces the poetics (and politics) of the old-fashioned.
You can check out the syllabus I designed for an undergraduate course on archaism here.
For a short but expanding “archive of archaizing media,” click here.
Come back soon for an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Derek Jarman’s playfully retrograde short video, Home Thoughts…