Mike Goode

I am a literary critic whose research focuses on how British Romantic literature intersects with histories and theories of media, historical understanding, law, gender, vision and the visual arts, ecology, and landscape design. My book, Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media (Oxford, 2020), develops a new method for assessing literary texts’ intellectual and political significance by attending to the later media in which they thrive. My earlier book, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790—1890 (Cambridge, 2009), traces how British debates over the French Revolution, historical novels, and the sexuality of antiquaries affected history’s formation as a discipline and the gendering of its authority. My publications also examine how historical reenacting is a mode of theorizing, how Romantic novels critique caricature, how postmodern novels eroticize epistemology, how proverbs operate as viral media, how fanfiction amounts to a design medium, how eighteenth-century landscape gardening matters philosophically, and how the early experiences of visual immersion afforded by panoramas and stereoscopes depended on a sense of frame. 

After earning a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University in 1993 and completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago in 2001, I joined the English Department at Syracuse University. At Syracuse, I teach interdisciplinary courses on British Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British cultural history, historical novels, manor house fictions and films, mediation and remediation, and the environment, as well as lead biennial study-abroad programs on “Jane Austen in Context” and “The Mysteries of London.” See my full CV here.

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