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Michael Rowland
Assistant Education Manager

Research

My current book project, based on my AHRC-funded thesis, is provisionally entitled 'Shame and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century: Politeness, Creativity, Affect'. It explores the effect on men of the newly commercial 'public sphere' that came to prominence at the beginning of the century, and tracks its affective trajectory. Following work by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I view shame as a social emotion which simultaneously isolates and connects men to the society they inhabit. I contend it is a catalyst for creativity and productivity in general, and explored this through a range of contemporary texts from Addison and Steele's The Spectator, early-century fop literature, Adam Smith's moral philosophy, Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son, the sentiment of Henry Mackenzie and finally the confessional journal of James Boswell. 

I am also interested in the following, more general areas: affect theory, especially shame; eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature; queer theory; materiality and the body; colonialism and imperialism; and all aspects of masculinity and male experience, for example: fatherhood, productivity and work, the male body, male friendships, desire, emotion, queer experience. I am particularly interested in how ideas of the masculine universal problematise our understandings of masculinity as a gender.