Department of English

Sophie Thomas
Associate Professor
DPhil, University of Oxford

Office: JOR 1041
Phone: 416-979-5000, ext. 2677
Email: sthomas@english.ryerson.ca

Sophie Thomas joined the English Department at Ryerson as an Associate Professor in 2009, after spending a decade at the University of Sussex in the UK, where in addition to teaching courses in the areas of Romanticism, visual culture and critical theory, she convened an MA program in Literature, Film and Visual Culture. Previously she taught in the English Department at the University of Toronto. Her recent book, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (Routledge, 2008), investigates the crosscurrents between visual culture and literary texts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on a variety of "sites" of seeing, and on the impact of new visual media on the literary and historical imagination. She has published articles on a variety of topics related to Romanticism and visual culture, and is currently working on a book about ruins, fragmentary objects and collections in the Romantic period.

Selected Publications

• Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008)
  http://www.routledge.com/books/Romanticism-and-Visuality-isbn9780415961189
• "‘Things on Holiday’: Collections, Museums, and the Poetics of Unruliness,” European Romantic Review 20:2 (April, 2009).
• "Seeing Past Rome,” in Regarding Romantic Rome, ed. Richard Wrigley (Peter Lang, 2007)
• "Making Visible: The Diorama, the Double, and the (Gothic) Subject,” in Romantic Circles, Praxis Series, Robert Miles, ed., Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era (University of Maryland, 2005). http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/gothic/thomas/thomas.html
• "Seeing Things (‘as they are’): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance,”
  Studies in Romanticism 43:4(Winter, 2004)
• "The Fragment” in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford University
  Press, 2004)