Alexander Regier teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, with a particular focus on the literary culture of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. His main research interests include aesthetics, Anglo-German relations, philosophy and poetics, visual culture, sports studies, and animal studies.
He is the author of Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He has edited the collection Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory (Palgrave, 2010) as well as special journal issues on “Mobilities” and “Genealogies”. Regier is co-editor (with Chris Young and Kasia Boddy) of the Bloomsbury Handbook on Sports Writing which is under contract.
Currently, he is working on awkwardness (Awkwardness: A Short Poetics) and animal studies (The Creaturely: Magic and Mimesis from Blake to Benjamin), while also completing a commissioned book entitled, Lesen macht Arbeit: The Labour of Reading (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022) which will appear in the series Wie wir lesen: Essays zur Geschichte und Zukunft des Lesens (How we Read: Essays on the History and Future of Reading).
Regier’s articles on Wordsworth, Blake, Moravianism, ruins, Johann Georg Hamann, Walter Benjamin and street names, gendered articles and philosophy, Durs Grünbein’s prose, utopianism, and the aesthetics of sport have appeared in The Cambridge Companion to "Lyrical Ballads" (ed. Bushell), European Romantic Review, Wordsworth in Context (ed. Bennett), The Byron Journal, Blake in Context (ed. Haggarty), Ruins of Modernity (ed. Hell, Schönle), Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (ed. Hamilton), The Germanic Review, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Durs Grünbein Today (ed. Young, Leeder), Tous azimuts, Sport in History, and Sporting Cultures (ed. O'Quin; Tadie).
Since 2011, Regier also serves as the editor of the scholarly journal SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.
He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, most recently an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (spent at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich) and a Visiting Fellowship at Centre for Research in the Arts Social Sciences and Humanities CRASSH (Cambridge).
Recent Awards, Grants, and Fellowships:
2018-19, Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers
2016, Visiting Fellowship at Centre for Research in the Arts Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH, Cambridge)
2016, Visiting Fellowship, Clare Hall, Cambridge
Specializations:
18th C. British and Enlightenment Studies
19th C. British
Literary Theory
Postcolonial & Transnational Studies
Animal Studies
Poetry & Poetics
Academic History:
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 2004
M.Phil., European Literature, University of Cambridge, 2000
B.A., Durham University, 1999