Taylor Schey is a literary studies scholar who works at the intersection of poetry and critical theory. A specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, he has written on a variety of subjects, from the poetics of political despair in the Romantic era to the fascination with impasse in contemporary theory. His work has appeared in ELH, MLQ, Studies in Romanticism, SubStance, and elsewhere, and he is co-editor of a special issue of Comparative Literature.
His current book project, The Rhetoric of Racialization: British Romanticism and Everyday Antiblackness, is about the quotidian figural operations through which logics of antiblackness were consolidated in the early nineteenth century. A small part of this project has appeared in Studies in Romanticism; larger ones—on the similes of white feminism and on the logic of blackface in canonical Romantic poetry—are in the pipeline. Also in the works is a separate piece on Jane Austen and what the emergence of the everyday as a conceptual resource teaches us about the insidious prerogatives of whiteness.
Taylor graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota and received his Ph.D. from Emory University. He is currently Assistant Teaching Professor of English at North Carolina State University, where he teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, theory, and literature and medicine. He was a finalist for the 2023 Anti-Racist Pedagogy Contest sponsored by Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.
Banner images are from the watercolor and gouache sketches of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851).