Department of English

Leah Brooksher’s research focuses on the literature and philosophy of the long eighteenth-century, with an emphasis on Romantic poetry. Her dissertation, Metric Modernity: Romantic Poetry, Enlightenment Philosophy, and the Measure of Reason, proposes that weights and measures become objects of increased attention and acquire new ideological significance in the politically turbulent period of the late eighteenth-century. Working across a broad, transatlantic archive that ranges from canonical Romantic poetry to cookbooks, parliamentary addresses to popular ballads, and moral philosophy to caricature, she unearths how weights and measures serve as crucial cultural sites in which the possibilities and limitations of revolutionary reason are negotiated and contested. Portions of this project have appeared in European Romantic Review, and her scholarship has been supported by a long-term fellowship from Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library.