DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Tristram Wolff received his PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley in 2013. He is Associate Professor of English at Northwestern, where he also teaches in the Programs in Comparative Literary Studies and Environmental Policy & Culture. His first book, Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism (Stanford UP, forthcoming 2022), shows how a poetics of naturalized language change in transatlantic romanticism transported the origins of language to an ongoing present, in answer to Enlightenment primitivism. Across the “romantic century” (1750-1850) of Wheatley, Blake, Wordsworth, and Thoreau, it takes poetry as a ground for observing how ideas about nature and race solidified during the rise of philology. 

Wolff's current book project, “Not Feeling It: Affect and Critique after Hazlitt” shows how Romantic-era writing on the passions, and the historical emergence of the role of the “critic,” have continued to shape contemporary debates about affect and emotion in our habits of critical reading. Other projects include an ongoing series of linked essays and presentations on the pastoral and the “folk” in and after nineteenth century Haitian poetry; and Background for Love (Pushkin Press, 2025), a translation of a German novella written in the 1930s by his grandmother, the editor and publisher Helen Wolff. His essays have appeared in ELH, NLH, PMLA, Essays in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Representations, and Yearbook of Comparative Literature. Forthcoming essays include “Lyric Exposure: Keats, Rankine, Hunt” (differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies). At Northwestern, he teaches classes on William Blake, transatlantic romanticism, literary “green worlds,” poetry and geology, and representations of oil and water as extractable resources in fiction and film.  

Specializations

Multilingual & Comparative Literatures, Critical Theory, 18th-century & Romantic Literature, Poetry & Poetics, 19th-century British Literature, Environmental Humanities, American Literature to 1900

Books

Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2022)

Recent Publications

• “Introduction” (w/ Lily Gurton-Wachter) to “Romantic Poetics of Public Feeling,” Romantic Circles Praxis Theory (2021)
• “That’s Close Enough: The Unfinished History of Emotivism in Close Reading,” PMLA 134.1  (2019) 
• “Being Several: Reading Blake with Ed Roberson,” New Literary History 49.4 (2018)
• “Romantic Stone Speech and the Appeal of the Inorganic,” English Literary History 84.3 (2017)