Nancy Yousef
Ph. D. Columbia
A.B. Harvard
My research and teaching are centered in British and European Romanticism, though my work also extends back to the eighteenth century and forward to early Modernism. I have a particular interest in philosophy and literature, and especially in understanding how these deeply related but often estranged forms of writing shape our thinking about emotions, ethics, and aesthetics. My most recent book, The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day (Oxford, 2022), is a study of the ordinary as a region of overlooked value in the work of the Romantic poet (William Wordsworth), the realist novelist (George Eliot), and the modern philosopher (Ludwig Wittgenstein) who are best known for their commitment to the everyday as a resource for reflection on language, thought, feeling, and social attunement. I am also the author of Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cornell, 2004) and Romantic Intimacy (Stanford, 2013) (winner of the Barricelli Book Prize), both of which track the conceptual contradictions and psychic longings associated with shifting ideas of selfhood, interdependence, sympathy and its limitations from the early Enlightenment through the Romantic era. My essays have appeared in venues including New Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, European Romantic Review, and the Journal of the History of Ideas, and my work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Newcombe Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Bogliasco Foundation. I am currently working on Thinking with Words: Undisciplined Readings in Modern Philosophy, a book which addresses the place of philosophy among the humanistic disciplines and aims to bring philosophers and literary scholars into collaboration through renewed commitment to historically informed interpretive practices.
Selected Publications:
-“Yours Truly, or Free Expression in the Post-War: Murdoch, Anscombe, Orwell.” ELH (forthcoming, 2025).
-“Philosophy, Literature, and the Avoidance of Reading,” New Literary History 54:4 (2024).
-“Middlemarch and the Art/Work of Philosophy” in Oxford Handbook of George Eliot, ed. Elisha Jane Cohen and Juliette Atkinson. Oxford University Press, 2025.
-“The (Hard) Practice of Reading: On the Use and Misuse of Wittgenstein for Literature” in Wittgenstein on Practice: Back to the Rough Ground, ed. Kevin Cahill. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
-“After Affects and Second Thoughts: Wordsworth, Eliot, and the Forms of Emotional Thinking” in Romanticism and Consciousness Revisited, eds. Joel Faflak and Richard Sha. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
-“Feeling for Philosophy: Shaftesbury and the Limits of Sentimental Certainty,” ELH, 78: 3 (2011).
-“Phenomenal Beauty: Rousseau in Venice” in Romanticism and the City, ed. Larry Peer. New York: Palgrave, 2010.
-“Romanticism, Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Silence,” European Romantic Review, 21: 5 (2010). (Winner of Keats-Shelley Association Essay Prize)
-“The Poverty of Charity: Dickensian Sympathy” in Contemporary Dickens, eds. Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David. Ohio State UP, 2009.
-“The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism, and Philosophy,” Modern Language Quarterly, June 2002.
-“Savage or Solitary?: The Wild Child and Rousseau’s Man of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas (April 2001).
-“Natural Man as Imaginary Animal in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 27: 3 (2000).
updated July 2025
