Dr Jessica Fay DPhil (Oxon), SFHEA

• DPhil, University of Oxford
• MA and BA, University of Liverpool

After taking an MA at the University of Liverpool, I was fortunate to win a Lamb and Flag Doctoral Scholarship at St John’s College, Oxford. On completing my doctorate, I moved to the Department of English at the University of Bristol where I held a Teaching Fellowship followed by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship.

I joined the University of Birmingham in 2018. In the Department of English Literature, I have held the posts of Teaching Fellow and Assistant Professor (Enterprise, Engagement, and Impact); in 2024 I will take up a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

I have convened and taught a diverse range of modules covering literature from the medieval period to the present. In particular, I enjoy teaching poetry and works of the long nineteenth century as well as supporting the development of undergraduate research projects.

In 2024 I became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I have supervised postgraduate research on Dorothy Wordsworth's correspondence, Percy Shelley's legacies, Romantic responses to Bruges, and the nineteenth-century painter William Collins.
I would be happy to discuss potential research projects in any area of Romanticism (especially those focusing on William and Dorothy Wordsworth), place-writing, or the relationship between poetry and painting.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I am a Romanticist with a focus on William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth. I am interested in connections between religion and literature, in landscape and visual culture, and in the significance of patterns of observance and observation (silence and the activity of looking) in Romantic writing.

My first monograph, Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance (OUP, 2018), investigates the poet’s engagement with the material and cultural legacies of medieval monasticism. My second book, The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family (LUP, 2021), explores the poet’s creative exchange with the artist, patron, and co-founder of the National Gallery, Sir George Beaumont. 

I am currently working on the first standalone edition of The Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth (CUP, 2026) and editing the first essay collection dedicated to her life, work, and reception, Dorothy Wordsworth in Context (CUP, 2027). 

I am also co-editing The Oxford Handbook of William Cowper (OUP, 2028), which will reassert his importance as a poet who bridges the divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic literature.  

At the University of Birmingham, with Professor Alexandra Harris, I lead the Arts of Place research network.  

I am a contributor to the National Trust’s Trusted Source project. See ‘What is the Picturesque?’ (The National Trust: Trusted Source, 2016).

In 2016, I was a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House Library where I explored the collection of eighteenth-century women’s writing, tracing connections between abolitionist literature, consumerism, and female education.

In research and public engagement activity, I work closely with The Wordsworth Trust.