Professor Damian Walford Davies

Rendel Professor of English and Head of Department
MA, MPhil, DPhil (Oxon) Photograph of Professor Damian Walford Davies.

Contact

Email: dmw@aber.ac.uk
Office: D69
Phone: +44 (0)1970 621781

Teaching Areas

Damian teaches English Romanticism; literature and politics in the age of the French Revolution; nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry; and the literature(s) of Wales.

Academic session 2010-2011: Damian was awarded a British Academy Research Development Award for the Oxford Literary History of Wales, of which he is General Editor.

Additional Interests

Damian is Chair of Literature Wales, the National Company for the development of literature in Wales. Literature Wales includes The Welsh Academy – the national Society of Writers in Wales – and Tŷ Newydd Writers’ Centre. See http://www.literaturewales.org/home/.

Centre for Romantic Studies

Damian is Co-director, with Richard Marggraf Turley, of the Centre for Romantic Studies (CRS) at Aberystwyth, which was officially launched at the ‘Romanticism, History, Historicism’ conference at Aberystwyth in June 2004 (see below). The Centre offers MA ‘pathways’, lecture programmes, funding schemes and other teaching/research activities, and hosts the ‘Landor Lecture’, delivered in recent years by Professor David Fairer,Professor Kenneth Johnston and Professor Fiona Stafford.

Committed to the need for international exchange and debate, CRS recently co-organised the international conference ‘The Wye Valley: Romantic Representations, 1640–1830’ at Tintern in 2011, from which resulted a special issue of the distingushed journal Romanticism. CRS is also co-organising the forthcoming international conference ‘Locating Revolution: Place, Voice, Community, 1790–1820’, to be held at Aberystwyth, 9–12 July 2012. Previous CRS conferences include ‘Romanticism, History, Historicism’ (2004) and ‘Romanticism, Environment, Crisis’ (2006), which considered the continuing urgency of the Romantic text at a time when changes in our biosphere threaten to realise Romanticism’s prophetic anxieties.

In 1999, Damian produced and directed the triple-CD recording, R.S. Thomas Reading the Poems, on which the great Welsh poet, who died the following year, reads a wide selection of his poetry spanning the period 1955-95.

With Mavis Nicholson and Trevor Fishlock, Damian judged the Wales Book of the Year, 2007.

Staff Publications

Damian’s latest monograph is Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English (University of Wales Press, 2012). The book traverses the disciplinary borders between Literary Studies, the Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Sciences, outlining a radical new ‘literary geography’ – new ways of reading maps in literature, and literature as maps. Damian is the author of Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s monograph ((University of Wales Press, 2002),, which examines the historical, political and cultural contexts that determined the Romantic self in a revolutionary decade. The book was co-recipient of the 2003 Aberystwyth University Foster Watson Memorial Gift). With colleague Richard Marggraf Turley, he has edited a volume entitled The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth Century Literature (Wayne State University Press, 2006), and, with Lynda Pratt (University of Nottingham), a collection of essays on the complex figuring of Wales in the Romantic period, Wales and the Romantic Imagination (University of Wales Press, 2007). He is also editor of a collection assessing the intervention and legacy of New Historicism in Romantic Studies, Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy (Routledge, 2008). He has published numerous articles on Romantic writers including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Beckford, Hazlitt, John Thelwall and De Quincey, together with an edition of the poetry of William Wordsworth (Everyman, 1994).

Oxford Literary History of Wales

Damian is General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Literary History of Wales, a major project that will bring the two literatures of Wales, considered in a radically new light, to the attention of an international audience. The OLHW also represents an important and timely collaboration between academic institutions in Wales.

Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Literature(s) of Wales

Damian’s work on twentieth-century poetry and prose includes articles on Yeats, R. S. Thomas, Alun Lewis, and Waldo Williams, together with the edited collection, Echoes to the Amen: Essays After R. S. Thomas (University of Wales Press, 2003; contributors include Geoffrey Hill and Rowan Williams), and an edition of the collected prose of the Welsh poet Waldo Williams (University of Wales Press, 2001; winner of the 2002/2003 Ellis Griffith and L.W. Davies awards).

Poetry and Creative Prose

Following the co-authored Whiteout (Parthian, 2006), Damian’s first solo poetry collection, Suit of Lights, was published by Seren in 2009.  Suit of Lights was chosen by the Wales Literature Exchange as one of its 10 ‘Bookshelf’ titles (‘represent[ing] the best in contemporary writing from Wales’) for promotion in Europe in 2010; for the promotional film, see http://www.cyfnewidfalen.org/authors.cfm?lan=e&switch=dsp&author_id=215. His latest collection, Witch (Seren, 2012), launched at the Hay Festival, dramatises the ‘making’ of a witch in the paranoid atmosphere of 1640s Suffolk. The collection Alabaster Girls will be published by Seren in 2014. Damian is currently completing a volume of poems entitled Judas, in which the (so-called) arch-betrayer speaks. Damian’s poems have appeared in journals including PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Wales, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Carcanet’s OxfordPoets 2007: An Anthology, Scintilla, and The Wolf. Damian has also edited and contributed to a collection of creative non-fiction essays that bring together (psycho-)geography, travel writing and environmentalist concerns: Megalith: Eleven Journeys in Search of Stones (Gomer, 2006); he is also exploring the genre of the ghost story (see ‘The Jumpers’, published in New Welsh Review, 88 (Summer 2010)).

Selected Publications

Monographs:

Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English (University of Wales Press, 2012)


Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002); co-recipient of the 2003 Aberystwyth University Foster Watson Memorial Gift, which recognises ‘the excellence of the best work’ by a member of staff published during the previous 5 years.

Edited Collections:

The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); with Richard Marggraf Turley.  Damian’s own essay in the volume is entitled ‘“In the Path of Blake”: Dylan Thomas’s “Altarwise by Owl-light”’. 
   
Wales and the Romantic Imagination (University of Wales Press, 2007); with Lynda Pratt.  Damian’s own contribution to the volume is entitled ‘“Sweet Sylvan Routes” and Grave Methodists: Wales in de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’.
    
Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R.S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).  Damian’s own article in the volume is entitled ‘“Double-entry Poetics”: R S Thomas – Punster’ 
   
Cof ac Arwydd: Ysgrifau Newydd ar Waldo Williams (Memory and Sign: New Essays on Waldo Williams); co-edited with Jason Walford Davies (Barddas, 2006). The volume offers radical new assessments of the greatest Welsh-language poet of the twentieth century, Waldo Williams.

Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy (New York: Routledge, 2009)

Scholarly editions:

William Wordsworth: Selected Poems (London: Dent, 1994) 
   
Waldo Williams: Rhyddiaith (Waldo Williams: Prose Works; Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001) – awarded the 2002/2003 Ellis Griffith and L.W. Davies awards by the University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies. The prizes are awarded for the most distinguished volume on a Welsh writer or artist to appear during the previous three years.

 

Creative Writing

Witch (Seren 2012)

Suit of Lights (Seren, 2009)

Whiteout (with Richard Marggraf Turley); a collection of poems published by Parthian, 2006. 
    
 (ed.) Megalith: Eleven Journeys in Search of Stones (Gomer 2006): a collection of creative non-fiction essays.

 

Selected Recent Articles and Contributions to Books

‘Capital Crimes: John Thelwall, “Gallucide” and Psychobiography’,  accepted for Romanticism, 18, 1 (2012), 55–69

‘“Furious Embrace”: Clive Hicks-Jenkins Among the Poets’, in Clive Hicks-Jenkins, ed. Peter Wakelin (London: Lund Humphries, 2011), 170–85.

‘“This Alabaster Spell”: Poetry as Historicist Method’, in The Artist in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions, ed. Richard Marggraf Turley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 27–48.

‘Romantic Hydrography: Tide and Transit in “Tintern Abbey”’, in English Romantic Writers and the West Country, ed. Nicholas Roe (Palgrave, 2010), 218–36.

‘“Yeats Said That”: R. S. Thomas and W. B. Yeats’, Almanac: A Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English 13 (2009), 1–26.

‘Byron’s Cain and the “History” of Cradle Songs’, in Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy, ed. Damian Walford Davies (Routledge, 2009), 126–42.

‘“Sweet Sylvan Routes” and Grave Methodists: Wales in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, in Wales and the Romantic Imagination, ed. Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (University of Wales Press, 2007), 199–227.