Dr James Vigus, BA MPhil PhD (Cambridge)

Profile

I studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate and PhD student, completing my dissertation on Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 2006. I then went to Germany to pursue a postdoctoral project tracking the intellectual and pedestrian journey of Henry Crabb Robinson in that country at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After three years at the Institute of Philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, I moved to the Department of English and American Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. I joined Queen Mary in September 2012. I spent the 2021-22 academic year as a fellow of the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. Alongside my academic publications I’ve written some books on chess, at which I hold the title of FIDE master.

Undergraduate Teaching

My Undergraduate teaching includes:

• ESH6065 Romantic Women Writers
• ESH396 Romantic Travellers in Europe
• ESH286 Romantics and Revolutionaries
• ESH6046 Jane Austen: Regency Novelist

Postgraduate Teaching

My teaching includes:

• ESH7066: International Romanticism

Research

Research Interests:

• British and European Romantic literature, philosophy and religion
• Anglo-German Cultural Relations
• Travel writing

Recent and On-Going Research

I research the literature and philosophy of the period of European Romanticism, especially the early reception of German thought in Britain, with particular focus on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry Crabb Robinson. As co-series editor of the Henry Crabb Robinson Project, I am preparing a critical edition of Robinson’s ‘Reminiscences’, held in manuscript by Dr Williams’s Library, for publication with Oxford University Press. The Project is affiliated with the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English. I have special responsibility for the topic ‘Crabb Robinson and Germany’, having published a critical edition of Robinson’s Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics (MHRA, 2010) and contextualised Robinson’s philosophical development in publications such as my essay collection (edited with Helmut Hühn, Jena) Symbol and Intuition: Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic-Period Aesthetics (Legenda, 2013). My uncovering of Robinson’s erudition in the field of aesthetics sprang from comparison with the prose works of Coleridge, which I analysed in relation to ancient Greek and modern German sources in Platonic Coleridge (Legenda, 2009). I continue to publish work on Coleridge’s philosophy.

From these core interests I have branched out into publications on topics such as the impact of Coleridge’s work on subsequent literary culture (Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. with Jane Wright, Palgrave 2008); and Anglo-German interpretations and adaptations of the forms of humour in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy, ed. with Kathleen M. Wheeler and Klaus Vieweg, Legenda 2013). Other topics within the culture of the ‘long’ eighteenth century culture that I have addressed include: the rights of animals, as discussed by both George Fox (founder of Quakerism) and Thomas Taylor the Platonist; intersections between religion and philosophy in Romantic-period writing; and Lord Byron’s satire on European politics in the 1820s. I am working on a project on Hamburg as a travel destination for British writers in the wake of the French Revolution, which engages with economic, social and environmental history. I am assistant editor of the De Gruyter journal Angermion: Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism, Intellectual History and Cultural Transfers.

Publications

Selected Publications:

Monograph:

Platonic Coleridge (Oxford: Legenda, 2009)

Critical edition:

Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays on Kant, Schelling and German Aesthetics (London: MHRA Critical Texts 18, 2010).

Edited collections:

Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy, ed. by Klaus Vieweg, James Vigus and Kathleen M. Wheeler (Oxford: Legenda, 2013)

Symbol and Intuition: Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic Aesthetics, ed. by Helmut Hühn and James Vigus (Oxford: Legenda, 2013)

Informal Romanticism (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012)

Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. by James Vigus and Jane Wright (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Translated monograph:

Christoph Bode, The Novel: An Introduction, translated from the German by James Vigus (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)

Book chapters and articles:

‘ “To oppose Buonaparte is the Sum & Substance of all our public Duties”: Henry Crabb Robinson as Times Correspondent in Hamburg-Altona in 1807’, Britische Deutschlandreisen / British Travels to Germany, ed. Franziska Bartl, Florian Klaeger and Frank-Lothar Kroll (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2024), 79-103

‘Almost Quakers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and the Society of Friends’, Il Confronto Letterario 80 (2023), 193-217

‘“Strange Sight this Congress!” Byron’s The Age of Bronze (1823) and the Congress of Verona’, English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts 9 (December 2022), 25-42, open access

‘Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion, ed. Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Cambridge: CUP, 2021), 237-56

‘Shandeanism, the Imagination, and Mysticism: Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, in Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature, ed. by Michael Forster and Lina Steiner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 297-314

‘Coleridge’s Shakespearean Transformation of Schiller’s Wallenstein Plays’, in Textual Transformations: Purposing and Repurposing Texts from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Neil Keeble and Tessa Whitehouse (Oxford: OUP, 2019), 227-47

‘“This is not quite fair, Master More!” Coleridge and the Cambridge Platonists’, in Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and Legacy, ed. by Douglas Hedley and David Leech (Dordrecht: Springer, 2019), 191-214

‘Die Schachnovelle im Hinblick auf die Geschichte des Schachs’, in Schachnovelle. Stefan Zweigs letztes Werk neu gelesen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2019), 85-102

‘Continental Romanticism in Britain’, in The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Literature, ed. by David Duff (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 691-706

‘A Weimar Constellation: Aesthetic Autonomy in Henry Crabb Robinson’s Private Lectures (1804) and Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807)’, in Idealismus und Romantik in Jena: Figuren und Konzepte zwischen 1794 und 1807, ed. Michael Forster, Johannes Korngiebel and Klaus Vieweg (Paderborn: Fink, 2018), 287-306

Timothy Whelan and James Vigus, ‘A Newly Discovered Coleridge Annotation’, Coleridge Bulletin n.s. 50 (Winter 2017), 85-94

‘The Owlet Atheism in the 1790s: An Essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry Crabb Robinson’, in Les philosophes et la libre pensée, ed. Gianenrico Paganini and Lorenzo Bianchi, (Paris: Champion, 2017), 525-540.

‘A “Romantic State of Uncertainty”: William Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey”’, Romantic Ambiguities: Abodes of the Modern, ed. Sebastian Domsch, Katharina Rennhak and Christoph Reinfandt (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017), 97-111

‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), The De Gruyter Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. Ralf Haekel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 360-375.

'“You surely don’t wish to cure Anglomania with Anglophobia”: Henry Crabb Robinson’s Debate on National Character and the English Reception of German Literature in the Neue Berlinische Monatschrift in 1803', Angermion 9:1 (December 2016), 43-70.

‘Conscience is God: Macbeth and Coleridge’s Translation of the Wallenstein Plays of Friedrich Schiller’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 46 (Winter 2015), 17-36.

‘Coleridge’s View of the Daimonion of Socrates and its Unitarian Context’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 43 (Summer 2014), 15-28.

‘Literary Reporter or Dissenting Autobiographer? Editing Henry Crabb Robinson’s Reminiscences’, paper for the Séminaire de recherche sur les îles Britanniques XVII^e–XVIII^e  siècles, Aix Marseille université (2014).

‘The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by William Mander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 520-40.

‘“That which people do trample upon must be thy food”: The Animal Creation in The Journal of George Fox’, in Ethical Perspectives on Animals in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Cecilia Muratori and Burkhard Dohm (Florence, 2013), pp. 193-211.

‘“Do ‘Friends’ allow puns’? Lamb on Quakers, Language and Silence’, in The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 157 (Spring 2013), 2-17.

‘Adapting Rights: Thomas Taylor's A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes’, in Romantic Adaptations, ed. by Cian Duffy, Peter Howell and Caroline Ruddell (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 41-56.

‘Romantic Insight’, in Die Aktualität der Romantik, ed. by Michael Forster and Klaus Vieweg (Berlin: LIT, 2012), 65-84.

‘Quaker Picaresque’, in Anglistentag 2011 Freiburg: Proceedings, ed. by Monika Fludernik and Benjamin Kohlmann (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012), 183-192.

‘Informal Religion: Lakers on Quakers’, in Informal Romanticism, as above, 97-114.

‘From Personal Identity to Character: Sterne and Hume’, in Shandean Humour, as above, 48-61.

‘Shandean Taylor Coleridge’, in Shandean Humour, as above, 92-109.

‘“All are but parts of one stupendous whole”? Henry Crabb Robinson’s Dilemma’, in Symbol and Intuition, as above, 123-138.

‘The Spark of Intuitive Reason: Coleridge’s “On the Prometheus of Aeschylus”’, in Symbol and Intuition, as above, 139-157.

‘The Romantic Fragment and the Legitimation of Philosophy: Platonic Poems of Reason’, Leopardi Centre website, University of Birmingham, 2011.

‘Hazlitt and Hume: Personal Identity as Imaginative Narration’, in Romantic Explorations, ed. by Michael Meyer (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011), 199-208.

‘Henry Crabb Robinson’s “initiation into the mysteries of the New School”’, in Romantic Localities, ed. by Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), 145-156.

‘Transzendentalpoesie bei Friedrich Schlegel im Vergleich zum Begriff “philosophic poem” bei Coleridge’, in Friedrich Schlegel und Friedrich Nietzsche. Transzendentalpoesie oder Dichtkunst mit Begriffen, ed. by Klaus Vieweg (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009), 133-143.

‘Coleridge’s Textual Afterlives’, in Coleridge’s Afterlives, as above, 1-19.

‘Zwischen Kantianismus und Schellingianismus: Henry Crabb Robinsons Privatvorlesungen über Philosophie für Madame de Staël 1804 in Weimar’, in Germaine de Staël und ihr erstes deutsches Publikum, ed. by Gerhard R. Kaiser and Olaf Müller (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 357-93.

‘Teach-yourself guides to the literary life, 1817-25: Coleridge, De Quincey, and Lamb’, in Charles Lamb Bulletin n.s. 140 (October 2007), 152-66

‘Did Coleridge read Plato by anticipation?’, in Coleridge Bulletin (Summer 2007), 65-73

‘“With his garland and his singing robes about him”: the persistence of the literary in the Opus Maximum’, in Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the ‘Opus Maximum’, edited by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 97-120.

See also my Queen Mary Research Publications profile

Supervision

My (co-)supervision of successful doctoral projects includes:

Alison McNaught, Women Booksellers in Eighteenth-Century London and Religious Dissent: Faith, Community and Trade (2022)

Ferdinand Saumarez-Smith (in partnership with KCL), Eleusis and Enlightenment: The Problem of the Mysteries in Eighteenth-Century (2021)

Tom Marshall, The Finite Mind: A Phenomenological Study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2019)

Sam Quill, ‘Fast Influencings: Figuring Necessity in Percy Bysshe Shelley’ (2019)

I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.

Public Engagement

Paper at the UCL Urban Salon ‘Walking as Method’, 11 November 2024

Workshop: Romantic Travel: Writing Germany and ‘the North’ – A workshop on European cultural transfer around 1800, Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study and online, 25 March 2022

Paper at Literaturhaus, Munich, 8 December 2017: ‘Stefan Zweigs Schachnovelle im Hinblick auf die Geschichte des Schachs’

Paper to Camden History Society, 20 July 2017: ‘Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867): Provincial Dissenter, Londonder, European’

Paper for the Senate House Library public series ‘Illuminations’: ‘Henry Crabb Robinson’s Bildungsreise’, 29 October 2015

Paper within the public Seminar in Dissenting Studies series held at Dr Williams’s Library, London, on 17 April 2013: ‘Researching Henry Crabb Robinson: What Became of his Early Interest in German Thought?’

Contributed to the Reliquiae Baxterianae online exhibition, https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/exhibit/reliquiae-baxterianae/-AJC4CrPoff9KA