Jeffrey Vail

Jeffrey Vail

Assistant Professor of Humanities
BA (English literature), Washington College; MA (English literature), PhD (English literature), University of Delaware
jwvail@bu.edu http://people.bu.edu/jwvail/
Research interests: British romantic poetry; 18th-century British literature; 19th-century fiction; modern and post-modern poetry

I’m primarily interested in British Romanticism, the poetry of individualism, imagination and revolt written by Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and others. I’m a specialist on Lord Byron. My book on Byron and his friend and fellow poet Thomas Moore was published by Johns Hopkins in 2001.

Last year I did seventy pages of notes for the new Modern Library edition of The Selected Poetry of Lord Byron.
Currently I’m finding, transcribing, and editing the unpublished letters of Moore. This project has taken me to over forty libraries and archival sources in four countries, and I’ve so far located over 600 previously unpublished letters of this important Irish poet.

Teaching in the CGS Humanities department allows me to teach everything from ancient Greek sculpture to the Beat poets of the 1950s and puts me in contact with some of the brightest and most eager young students I’ve known.