Nicholas Seager

Biography

I joined Keele in 2009, having studied at the Universities of East Anglia, Leeds, and Nottingham. I teach courses across the English Literature programme. My research interests are in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, particularly the intersections between literature and history, religion, politics and philosophy, as well as the relationships between historicism, formalism and book history.

Since April 2020, I have been the Head of the School of Humanities.

Research and scholarship

My research interests are in English Literature from 1660 to 1830. The first is Daniel Defoe, and I have published widely on Defoe in recent years. I was awarded an AHRC fellowship for my edition The Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and the edition received The Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize in 2023. I co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe (Oxford University Press, 2023) with J. A. Downie (Goldsmiths, University of London). With Marc Mierowsky (University of Melbourne), I co-edited Defoe’s final novel The Fortunate Mistress (1724) for Oxford World’s Classics, published for its tercentenary in 2024.

My research is more broadly concerned with the development of the novel in the eighteenth century and in the later critical reception and creative appropriation of this period’s fiction. In 2012, my book on literary criticism on the eighteenth-century British novel was published by Palgrave Macmillan; this research historicises the developing notion of ‘the rise of the novel’ from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of the genre’s provenance through to its treatment in critical schools like historicism, formalism, feminism, and postcolonialism. I co-edited with Daniel Cook (University of Dundee) a collection of essays entitled The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2015) which comprises essays on adaptations and appropriations of the novel, from Haywood, Defoe and Swift to Shelley, Scott and Austen.

In 2016, I completed an edition of a biography by Samuel Johnson, called An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744). This was published by Broadview Press and is co-edited with Lance Wilcox (Elmhurst College, Illinois). I co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels (Cambridge University Press, 2023) with Daniel Cook. I am working on a book The Uses of Books in the Long Eighteenth Century with Leah Orr (University of Louisiana, Lafeyette), for Cambridge University Press.

I am an elected at-large member of the Daniel Defoe Society. I am a member of the advisory board of the Stoke Newington Edition of Daniel Defoe's Works and a general editor of Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO), for which I have edited Montagu’s letters to the musician and naturalist Benjamin Stillingfleet.

I would be very happy to hear from prospective postgraduates interested in researching literature of the period from 1660-1830.

Teaching

In 2023-24, I am teaching ENG-20050 The Renaissance and ENG-20082 Classic Novels on Screen.

I am external examiner for BA English at the University of Bristol (2021-25), and I was external examiner for BA English at Northampton (2016-20) and BA and MA English at Bath Spa University (2020-24).

In 2016-17 I ran with Dr Ben Anderson in History a teaching innovation project designed to help students use Turnitin originality reports.

In 2013 I received a Keele Teaching Excellence Award for Teaching.

I supervise research students on the MA English Literatures. If you are interested in postgraduate work in literature at Keele, please get in touch.

The PhD students I have supervised to completion are:

Dr Elizabeth Pritchett (English), ‘Vital Texts: Democratic Intertextuality in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’ (2017). Second supervisor; Prof. Scott McCracken was lead supervisor.

Dr George Stringer (English), ‘Tilly Kettle’s Portraiture and the Art of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain and India’ (2018).

Dr Hannah Scragg (English), ‘Beyond the Five Towns: A Re-evaluation of Arnold Bennett’ (2019).

Dr Pilar Botiás (English; University of Córdoba, Spain), ‘“Pleasant Modern Novels”: Congreve’s Incognita in the Making of the English Novel’. Co-supervised with Juan de Dios Torralbo-Caballero (Córdoba). (2022)

Dr Amy Blaney (English), ‘King Arthur in British Literature, 1660–1815’ (2024).

Dr Edward Hardiman (History), ‘Codebreaking the Diary of a Georgian Gentleman: The Private Papers of Andrew Hudleston’ (2024).

Dr Tracey Jones (English), 'The Emotional History of the Gothic Novel, 1790-1810' (2024).

Current PhD students are:

Emma Stanbridge (English), ‘Rewriting Lives: Reading, Sociability, and Authority in Women's Literary Biography, 1780-1820’.

Joanna Yates (English), 'Inheriting Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature: Family History, Evolutionary Thought, and Public Debate' (co-supervised with David Amigoni).

Jo Butler (History), ‘Women’s Work in the Eighteenth-Century Midlands Book Trade’.