Research Expertise and Interest

18th-century and Romantic British literature, Milton, literature and the history of science, especially medicine.

Research Description

Kevis Goodman teaches and writes in the fields of 18th-century and Romantic Literature in Britain, with a secondary expertise in Milton and the English Civil War era. Within those historical periods, her interests gravitate toward questions concerning aesthetics and poetics, science and literature, and literary historiography.  She is the author of Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge 2004; paperback edition 2008), and the editor of The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (Oxford, 2016), a volume in the Berkeley-Tanner Lectures series.

Her most recent book, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (Yale University Press, 2022), studies the common ground and emerging differences between medicine, on the one  hand, and aesthetic theory and poetic practice, on the other, during the British Enlightenment and Romantic periods.  In particular, it analyzes both as environmental sciences – alert to the precarious ecology between persons and their worlds, and concerned with the sensuous experience of place and displacement during an era defined by unprecedented degrees and kinds of mobility.

In addition, her articles have appeared in a number of journals, including English Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Wordsworth Circle, and European Romantic Review, as well as in several book collections.