Office: 366 EPB
Phone: 319-335-1510
E-Mail: Eric-Gidal@uiowa.edu

• Curriculum Vitae
• Selected Publications/Projects
• Courses
• 18th/19th-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium

Eric Gidal

18th Century and Romantic

My teaching and scholarship stem from my interest in English romanticism as a mode of artistic expression rooted in the eighteenth century. Specifically, I am interested in the relationship between literature and the visual arts during the period and in the emergence of the aesthetic as a secular category of ethical experience and communal identification. These issues coalesce in my book Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (Bucknell University Press, 2001), a study of the British Museum during its first century (1753-1856) as a focal point of contemporary aesthetics and ideological debates. My current research focuses more philosophically upon the affective dimension of national ideologies and the public sphere, exploring how the discourse of melancholy, that quintessential Romantic stance, was transformed in the eighteenth century from a sign of humoral imbalance, intellectual genius, or religious vocation into a category of national identification and a mark of civil society

I also serve as Review Editor (Romanticism) for Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.