Research Bio

Kevis Goodman is Professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English. She 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. Her first book was Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge 2004; paperback edition 2008). More recently, she wrote Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics and Poetics (Yale University Press, 2023), which was awarded the annual Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for the year's best book in Romantic studies from the International Conference on Romanticism. It also received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, for the best academic book of literature, science, and the arts, from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

She has also edited and introduced several collections, including Eric Santner et al., The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (Oxford, 2016), a volume in the Berkeley-Tanner Lectures series. Most recently, she co-edited and co-wrote the introduction to the final (posthumous) essay collection of the critic and literary theorist, Geoffrey Hartman: Holocaust and Hope: Literature, Testimony, Media, ed. Kevis Goodman and Brian McGrath (Lit Z series, Fordham University Press, 2026).

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.

Research Expertise and Interest

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