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James Engell

Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University

Areas of expertise

  • - Romantic, Eighteenth-Century, and Restoration British Literature
  • - Comparative Romanticism
  • - Criticism and Critical Theory
  • - Rhetoric
  • - Environmental Studies
  • - History and Economics of Higher Education

Major works

The Call of Classical Literature in the Romantic Age (2017, ed. with K. P. Van Anglen) and contributor, "The Other Classic: Hebrew Shapes British and American Literature and Culture."  William Wordsworth's Prelude (1805), edited from the manuscripts and fully illustrated in color (2016, ed. with Michael D. Raymond).  Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (2008, ed. with Adelson, Ranalli, and Van Anglen).  Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005, with Anthony Dangerfield).  The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values (1999).  Coleridge: The Early Family Letters (1994, ed.).  Forming the Critical Mind (1989).  Johnson and His Age (1984, ed. and contributor).  Biographia Literaria for the Collected Coleridge (1983, ed. with W. Jackson Bate).  The Creative Imagination:  Enlightenment to Romanticism (1981).  

About me

James Engell is Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, also a member of the Committee on the Study of Religion, and a faculty associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment.  He has also directed dissertations in American Studies, as well as Romance Languages & Literatures (French).