James Morland

I received my MA (Hons) in English from the University of St Andrews in 2012, before coming to King's College London to study on the interdisciplinary MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Since September 2014 I have been a PhD student in the English department at King's, specialising in eighteenth-century poetry. Most recently, I was an AHRC IPS fellow at the Huntington Library in California for the 2015/16 academic year.

My current research looks at the intersection between poetry and philosophy in the long eighteenth-century, with a specific interest in the changing interactions with Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. I am particularly interested in the concept of making this 'atheistic' poetry 'Englished' in the early part of the period and the effect it had on the production of different types of poetry in the eighteenth-century. Within this, I have a specific interest in the likes of Edward Young and the 'graveyard school', Alexander Pope, James Thomson, Erasmus Darwin, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

My research also looks at these poetics in relation to developments in intellectual and scientific history, seeing Lucretius as a key figure and influence within an eighteenth-century poetic questioning of the increasingly secular scientific and materialist conceptions of man and the universe.