Latest news

Dr Adam J. Bridgen, DPhil

2nd December 2020

was recently awarded a DPhil in English Literature from Oxford University, for his landmark exploration of the significance of transatlantic slavery in British labouring-class writing during the long eighteenth century. An interdisciplinary scholar, he seeks to complicate and enrich existing histories of empire, environment, and animal ethics by considering forms of writing not traditionally given attention in academic scholarship. His research on ‘shoemaker-poet’ James Woodhouse (1735-1820) has been published in the Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 1 (2017) and on their Verso blog, and his latest work on the incipient ecosocialism of labouring-class writing will appear in the collection Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class, and Empire, edited by Ve-Yin Tee (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). His main contribution to the field of animal ethics concerns the vegetarian hat-maker and self-help writer Thomas Tryon (1634-1703): he has work forthcoming on Tryon’s theology of animal enslavement, as well as on his influential rejection of fur-wearing — for which he received the British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies Committee Award — and is currently working on a book-length study of Tryon aimed at a popular readership. He was President of the Oxford University Society Animal Ethics Society from 2014-15, and contributed to the development of the pioneering 2016 ‘Veggie Norrington Table’.