Anthony Howe

Biography

I am a Reader in English Literature, with particular expertise in Romantic-period poetry. I teach across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules, and I’m Course Director for the MA in English Literature.

Expertise

I have been teaching English Literature at universities for more than twenty years. I am widely published in my field. My monograph, Byron and the Forms of Thought, offers an extended reading of how philosophical thought relates to poetic form. I have contributed to several Oxford Handbooks, and I am co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I have also published on Keats, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and letter writing in the Romantic period. I am currently writing a book about silence and poetry.    

Journey to BCU

I studied English Literature at Liverpool University, gaining a BA and MA degree. This was followed by a PhD – the basis of my Byron book – at Cambridge University, where I began teaching undergraduates. I then had teaching jobs at Cambridge and Oxford, before moving to BCU in 2009.   

Notable projects

I’ve been thinking and writing about the function and presence of silence in literature for a while. I’m interested in how we write about the absence of sound, about the philosophical and historical contexts of silence, how it becomes an aesthetic object.

English in Birmingham

One of my favourite modules to teach is ‘Literature and Place’ on the MA. We think about how literary writing describes and reflects, but also constitutes, a variety of places, from country houses to imagined hellscapes to contemporary inner cities. Part of this involves walking the streets of Birmingham and learning some of its amazing stories.