Dr Elinor Shaffer

Dr Elinor Shaffer, FBA, is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study (Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies), University of London, as well as Research Director and Series Editor of the Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe. She is also UK director of the British Academy Network on Reception Studies and a Distinguished Fellow of the European Humanities Research Centre, Oxford. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford, from which she holds the degree of B.A. (Hons) in English Language and Literature, and M.A., and Columbia University, where she was awarded a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature. Dr Shaffer has held positions at the University of California Berkeley, Clare Hall College Cambridge and the University of East Anglia. Visiting Professorships have taken her, among other places, to Brown University, Stanford University (USA), Freie Universität Berlin, and to Zurich and Stockholm.

Three areas are the main focus of her research:

· Romanticism, in particular Coleridge studies. The main publication in this research area is her book 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1975). The relation between English and German thought of this period is analysed in various articles, including ′The Hermeneutic Community: Coleridge and Schleiermacher′ in The Coleridge Connection, ed. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (London: Macmillan, March 1990), pp. 220-29.

· Literature and the Visual Arts, including work on Samuel Butler, William Beckford and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other publications in this field of research include ′''To remind us of China'': William Beckford, Mental Traveller on the Grand Tour: The Construction of Landscape′, in Transports: Imaginative Geographies 1600-1830, ed. C. Chard and Helen Langdon (Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre, 1996). Her book Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer and Art Critic (Reaktion Books, 1988) led to a led to a series of exhibitions of Butler's works, culminating in the Centenary Exhibition held at St John's College Cambridge in 2002, and in an exhibition of his photography at the Tate Britain (2002-3).

· Literature and Science. Work in this area has included the editing of The Third Culture: Literature and Science (De Gruyter, 1998), ICLA Literary Theory Colloquium, held at the University of London.

Large-scale editorial activities include the Athlone Critical Traditions: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, published by Continuum, with eleven volumes published to the end of 2006. For details of the series see the Project home page. From 1979 t0 2004 she edited the annual journal Comparative Criticism, published by Cambridge University Press.

For the activities of the Research Project on the Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe and the British Academy Network on Reception Studies see Project Events.

Dr Shaffer frequently acts as a reviewer of academic publications and organizer of research colloquia and seminars. Work in progress includes:

Coleridge's Literary Theory (Cambridge University Press)

Coleridge′s Writings: On Criticism, 3 vols (Macmillan), vol. 1: On Shakespeare

Dr Shaffer is a founding member of the Executive Committee of the British Comparative Literature Association and a past member of the Literary Theory Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association.