Romanticism scholar awarded prestigious Fleeman fellowship

When Dr Tom Duggett of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University opened an email from the University of St Andrews and saw “Thank you for your application,” his initial reaction was disappointment. He assumed his application for the prestigious Fleeman Fellowship had been rejected.

But as he read the email, Dr Duggett realised it was inviting him to be the Fleeman Research Fellow in 2023-2024 at St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university.

“I was genuinely surprised, because it is such an honour,” says Dr Duggett, a Senior Associate Professor in Romantic Literature at XJTLU’s School of Humanities and Social Science. Only one Fleeman Fellowship is awarded each academic year to a visiting scholar to research 18^th-century literature and culture at St Andrews.

Dr Duggett’s research focuses on the politics and culture of Romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He will continue his work on two books during his stay at the University of St Andrews.

One is a scholarly edition of Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 novel The Romance of the Forest, to be published as Volume III of the Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Ann Radcliffe. The other is a research monograph, provisionally titled Coleridge and History: Romanticism, Method, and the Mind in Time, to be offered to a major academic publisher.

Dr Duggett says a key advantage of the fellowship is access to the University of St Andrews’ library, which includes useful resources for his research.

“The library’s collection includes a rare first edition of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), which I am using as the principal textual ‘witness’ for my edition of the novel for Cambridge University Press,” he says.

The University of St Andrews also holds manuscripts important to his Coleridge and History monograph.

Dr Duggett recently published “Coleridge and the Idea of History” in the journal Romanticism, and also contributed the chapter on History to the New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge published in 2022. His previous works include books, journal articles, and book chapters. His monograph Gothic Romanticism: Wordsworth, Architecture, Politics, Form, published in an expanded second edition by Palgrave in 2022, was awarded the 28^th Modern Language Association of America (MLA) Prize for Independent Scholars for Distinguished Research in Language and Literature.

Dr Duggett is an Associate Editor of the journal Romanticism, a Committee Member of the Friends of Coleridge, a Life Member of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is also a member of the MLA, the English Association, the British Association for Romantic Studies, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association.

By Ying Jiang

Edited by Tamara Kaup