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 Value, traces the shifting conceptions of measurement in the cultural imaginaries of the eighteenth-century British and Atlantic worlds in order to uncover the central role that mensuration plays in mediating the antimonies of the era’s empiricist thought. Working across a broad transatlantic archive that includes canonical poetry, Parliamentary addresses, natural, moral, and aesthetic philosophy, legal statutes, economic treatises, and even cookbooks, she shows how eighteenth-century writers locate in the aporetic character of measurement a generative conceptual idiom that allows them to challenge the bifurcation of fact and value that underwrites the empiricism of the Enlightenment. Portions of this project are forthcoming from European Romantic Review, and her scholarship has been supported by a long-term fellowship from Yale's Lewis Walpole Library.