Dr. Rowan Boyson

Biography

Rowan Rose Boyson is a Reader at King's College London, specializing in Eighteenth-Century Romantic Literature and Environmental Humanities. Originally from Yorkshire and raised in Essex, she attended grammar school before studying for her BA and MPhil at Cambridge. As a Knox Fellow, Rowan spent time studying at Harvard University before returning to London to complete her PhD in 2008 on 'Communis Voluptas: Pleasure Wordsworth Eighteenth-Century Thought' under the supervision of Professor Paul Hamilton at Queen Mary, University of London. She began her academic career at Queen Mary before becoming a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge in 2009. Subsequently, she joined King's College London in 2012 as a Lecturer and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016. Her research interests include environmental humanities, the history of the senses, Eighteenth-Century Romantic poetry—especially the works of Wordsworth and Shelley—and historical political thought. Currently, she is developing a project titled 'Shared Air: Atmosphere and the Right to Breathe in Enlightenment Britain', which delves into the political implications of air as a shared resource. Rowan's extensive teaching contributions range from modules on Romantic literature to eco-critical approaches to literature and the Anthropocene. She actively engages in public scholarship and has collaborated on projects addressing the cultural implications of smell loss.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards