Jonathan Sachs (NHC Fellow, 2014–15; 2023–24)

Jonathan Sachs is professor of English at Concordia University in Montréal. His work focuses on British literature from 1750–1850, exploring the role of literature in constructing historical and temporal experience, including the uses of antiquity, the anticipation of the future, and practices of reading. Currently at work on a monograph titled, Slow Time: A Literary Experiment, Sachs is the author of The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–1832 (Oxford University Press, 2010), and the coauthor, with The Multigraph Collective, of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). He has recently finished, with Andrew Stauffer, a new one-volume edition, Lord Byron: Selected Writings for the Oxford University Press series 21st-Century Oxford Authors.

Sachs has served as the Principal Investigator of the Interacting with Print Research Group (2014–2020), as the Romanticism Section editor of Blackwell’s Literature Compass (2015–2020) and as a member of the MLA’s Executive Committee for Later Eighteenth-Century Literature (2015–2020). He has held a range of international fellowships, including Visiting Fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In March 2010, Sachs was the Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol. More recent research has been supported by multiple awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center (2014–15) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2017–18).

Selected Publications

• Sachs, Jonathan, and Andrew Stauffer, eds. Lord Byron: Selected Writings. 21st-Century Oxford Authors. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023. Forthcoming.
• Sachs, Jonathan. “Slow Time.” PMLA: Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 134, no. 2 (March 2019): 315–31.
• Sachs, Jonathan. The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Sachs, Jonathan, and The Multigraph Collective. Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Sachs, Jonathan. Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Fellowship Work Report, 2014–15

Jonathan Sachs finished writing his book Decline and the Depths of Time: Historicity and the Forms of Ruin in British Romanticism and cowrote Interacting with Print, 1700–1900. He also wrote “The Historical Context,” a chapter on Jane Austen’s Emma, for The Cambridge Companion to “Emma”; “What Is Decline?,” a chapter for an edited volume on decline; and an article on “Slow Time, Fast Time, Deep Time.”