Overview
Timothy Heimlich is Assistant Professor of English. Before coming to Duke, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently taught at the University of Cambridge (UK) and in the Netherlands. His teaching and research focus on eighteenth-century literature, with special interests in the formation of British imperial culture, transnational studies, and the global contexts of British Romanticism. He has published essays on these topics in venues including Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, MLQ, and ELH.
His first book, Wales, Romanticism, and the Making of Imperial Culture (University of Cambridge Press, 2025), argues that Wales played a crucial role in literary inventions of an imperial Britishness both within Britain and abroad. His current book project explores the relationship of gothic writing and painting to the cultural legacies of imperial expansion and the European Enlightenment. Other research interests include Welsh writing in English, the fiction and especially the verse of Walter Scott, and eighteenth-century visual culture.
His first book, Wales, Romanticism, and the Making of Imperial Culture (University of Cambridge Press, 2025), argues that Wales played a crucial role in literary inventions of an imperial Britishness both within Britain and abroad. His current book project explores the relationship of gothic writing and painting to the cultural legacies of imperial expansion and the European Enlightenment. Other research interests include Welsh writing in English, the fiction and especially the verse of Walter Scott, and eighteenth-century visual culture.
Office Hours
Fall '25 Semester:
Wednesdays and Fridays 12:15 -1:15 PM (303I Allen)
Wednesdays and Fridays 12:15 -1:15 PM (303I Allen)
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Assistant Professor of English
·
2025 - Present
English,
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Recent Publications
Walter Scott’s Place Reading, 1805–1816
Journal Article European Romantic Review · January 1, 2022 This essay explores Walter Scott’s artistic pivot from writing poetry to writing novels during the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent “heroic age of popular Radicalism.” In the famine-stricken postwar years, early British socialists like Robert Owen wrongl ... Full text CiteThe silence of the land: Antiquarian gothic and Ireland, 1790-1831
Journal Article Elh English Literary History · September 1, 2021 Full text CiteRomantic wales and the imperial picturesque
Journal Article Modern Language Quarterly · June 1, 2020 This essay argues that the aesthetic category named the picturesque was first systematized in a Welsh colonial context and that picturesque looking always reflects, to some degree, its initially imperialist function. While the picturesque rapidly acceded t ... Full text CiteEducation, Training & Certifications
University of California, Berkeley ·
2019
Ph.D.
University of Wisconsin, Madison ·
2010
B.A.