Profile
Professor Alan Vardy earned his PhD from the University of Washington in 1996.
His research areas include British Romanticism, Labouring-class Poets, Landscape and Nature, and Pedestrianism. He is the author of John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Palgrave Publishers, 2003), and Constructing Coleridge: The Posthumous Life of the Author (Palgrave, 2010). His current book project, In Transit: Time and Terrain in British Romantic Writing, explores the scope and dimensions of walking and cognition in the works of writers as disparate as Thomas De Quincey, Joseph Cottle, Clare, Coleridge (and his daughter, Sara), the late Wordsworth, and Robert Southey.
Professor Vardy teaches Romantic Literature and Critical Theory at the Undergraduate and Master's levels. He is a member of the PhD faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also Editor of the journal Essays in Romanticism.
Constructing Coleridge: The Posthumous Life of the Author examines Coleridge's penchant for re-invention and carefully demonstrates how the Coleridge family editors followed his lead in constructing his posthumous reputation. Following his death in 1834, the family editors faced immediate scandals and sought to construct the Coleridge they preferred in these trying circumstances.