Taylor Schey is a literary studies scholar who works at the intersection of poetry and critical theory. A specialist in British Romanticism, he has written on a variety of subjects, from the poetics of political despair to the fascination with impasse in contemporary theory. His articles have appeared in venues such as ELH, MLQ, Studies in Romanticism, and SubStance, 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 insidiously consolidated in the early nineteenth century. A small part of this project has appeared in Studies in Romanticism; larger sections—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 unremarkable prerogatives of whiteness.
Schey is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He has previously taught at North Carolina State University, the University of Michigan, and Macalester College.
Banner images are from the watercolors and gouache sketches of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851).