Angela Esterhammer

Angela Esterhammer works in the areas of British, German, and European Romanticism and nineteenth-century culture, from perspectives that emphasize performativity and performance. Her books Creating States (1994) and The Romantic Performative (2000) approach literary texts from the viewpoint of verbal performativity, speech acts, and philosophies of language. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 (2008) uncovers the popularity of on-stage poetic improvisers during the “Romantic century,” tracing the influence of improvisational poetry across Europe and showing how improvisation interacts with Romantic ideas about genius, spontaneity, orality, gender, and national identity (see also the online database “The Improvisation of Poetry, 1750-1850”). Her recent book, Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (2020), concerns experimental uses of textual, visual, and performative media during the 1820s. As the General Editor of The Works of John Galt, she leads an international project to publish a 20-volume critical edition of Galt’s fiction. Other areas covered in her research and teaching are Romantic poetry (Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Hemans, Landon, Hölderlin) and fiction (Scott, Godwin, Kleist, Staël). Professional roles include: Founding Member and Executive Committee member of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR); Founding Director of Western University's graduate program in Comparative Literature and the University of Zurich's PhD program in English and American Literary Studies; Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. She is a past holder of the Distinguished University Professorship (Western), the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and the Polanyi Prize for Literature, a member of the Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.