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Professor Damian Walford Davies

Professor and Head of Department
MA, MPhil, DPhil (Oxon)

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.

Research

Damian is currently completing a monograph entitled Cartographies of Culture: Six Maps of Welsh Writing in English. 

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

Additional Interests

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 2003 (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 and Professor Kenneth Johnston.

Together with Richard Marggraf Turley, Damian organised the ‘Romanticism, History, Historicism’ conference at the Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 18-22 June 2004. This international gathering discussed the ways in which Historicist approaches have shaped our understanding of such issues as gender, authorship, canon formation and the relationship between text, culture and politics in the Romantic period.  In 2006, Damian co-organised the second international CRS conference, ‘Romanticism, Environment, Crisis’, 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.

Staff Publications

Romanticism

Damian has published a monograph examining the historical, political and cultural contexts that determined the Romantic self in a revolutionary decade, Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (University of Wales Press, 2002; 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 Romatic 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 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

Damian’s first collection of poems, Whiteout (Parthian, 2006) was co-authored with colleague Richard Marggraf Turley. His 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 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. He is currently completing a collection entitled Alabaster Girls. 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:

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.

Selected Articles:

‘Cain and the “History” of Cradle Songs’, in Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy, ed. Damian Walford Davies (Routledge, forthcoming, 2008)

 ‘“Sweet Sylvan Routes” and Grave Methodists: Wales in Thomas 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

 ‘“In the Path of Blake”: Dylan Thomas’s “Altarwise by Owl-Light”‘, in The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature (Wayne State University Press, 2006), 11–40

 ‘“At Defiance”: Iolo, Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth’ in A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), 147–72.

 ‘“Cymodi â’r Pridd”: Wordsworth, Coleridge, a Phasg Gwaredol Waldo Williams’ (‘“Reconciliation with the Soil”: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Waldo Williams’s Easter Deliverance’), in Cof ac Arwydd: Ysgrifau Newydd ar Waldo Williams (Barddas, 2006), 83–107

 “‘Double-entry Poetics”: R.S. Thomas – Punster’ in Echoes to the Amen: Essays After R.S. Thomas, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 149–82

‘Waldo Williams, “In Two Fields”, and the 38th Parallel’ in The Idiom of Dissent: Protest and Propaganda in Wales, ed. T Robin Chapman (Gomer, 2006)

‘The Politics of Allusion: Caleb Williams, The Iron Chest, Middlemarch, and the Armoire de Fer’, Review of English Studies (November 2002)

‘“The Frequencies I commanded”: Recording R.S. Thomas’. North American Journal of Welsh Studies 2:1 (Winter, 2001/2002); online version: http://www.2.bc.edu/~ellisjg/vol2.htm

‘“A Mad Hornet”: Beckford’s Riposte to Hazlitt’, The European Romantic Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Fall 1999) and Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 452-79 and 97-99 (with Laurent Châtel, of the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III)

In the Path of Blake: Dylan Thomas’s “Altarwise by Owl-light”, Sonnet I’, Romanticism 3.1 (1997), 91-110

‘Lucy’s Trodden Ways’, Essays in Criticism, Vol. XLVII, No. 1 (January 1997), 62-70

‘Hermits, Heroes, and History: Lamb’s “Many Friends”‘, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, New Series No. 97 (January 1997), 9-29

Contributions to Books, Reference Works etc

An article on the philosopher and political theorist David Williams (1738-1816) for the New Dictionary of National Biography  (2004)

Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ in The Blackwell Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 269-76

‘“Rewriting the Law-Books”: The Poetry of Popular Music’ in Welsh Music History 1 (1996), 180–240

Translations

Y Ffisegwyr: a translation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, Die Physiker (Aberystwyth: CAA, 1991)

Creative Writing

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.