Michael J. Sullivan is a literary critic at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and General Editor of The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson for Oxford University Press. His interests span the poetics and verse cultures of the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries, with publications on Victorian and Romantic literature and special interests in poetic drafts and the transnational drift of verse forms. He is Principal Investigator of Recovery of Literary Manuscripts, a Digital Humanities project applying multispectral imaging to the study of modern anglophone literature. This interdisciplinary project is developing new techniques to restore lost lines of literary manuscripts, revealing more of the world’s extant literature that has remained beyond the reach of critics.
Prior to his arrival at St Catherine’s, he was a Research Fellow in English at Christ Church, Oxford, and held the Rodney G. Dennis Visiting Fellowship in the Study of Manuscripts at Harvard. His work on Tennyson’s revisions – which he began at Trinity College, Cambridge – won the Gordon Duff Prize, and he is Guest Editor of Special Issues of the Tennyson Research Bulletin and Victorian Poetry. He is the author of articles on elegy, identity, and internationalism in modern poetics, and his work is published in The Review of English Studies, Essays in Criticism, Victorian Poetry, and The Cambridge Quarterly among others. He is currently finishing Tennyson: A Life in Manuscripts and writing Transnational Verse Forms: The Making of Stanzas in Modern Poetics.
Background
Michael completed his PhD in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after studying for the MPhil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies, both funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Before his postgraduate research, he graduated from the University of Durham, where he was a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar and winner of the T. W. Craik, Brooks Johnson, and J. R. Watson prizes. He was educated at state schools in Yorkshire, and contributes to access, outreach, and public engagement for literature and the humanities.
BlueSky: @michaeljsullivan