James Vigus, BA, MPhil, PhD (Cambridge)

Visiting Research Fellow, Dr Williams’s Centre, and Assistant Editor, Crabb Robinson Project

James Vigus is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (from October 2009). His research project, entitled From Unitarianism to Romanticism: philosophical necessity and aesthetic autonomy, aims to test the hypothesis that prominent Unitarian travellers to Germany around 1800 set off with questions about the freedom of the will, and returned with a passionate interest in aesthetics.

His critical edition Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics was published by the MHRA in late 2010. He is currently working on further editions of Crabb Robinson’s writings, including the first travel diary and a section of the voluminous correspondence (1800-1805, the years spent in Germany).

His recent publications related to the English Romantic reception of German thought include:

‘Henry Crabb Robinson’s Initiation into the “Mysteries of the New School”: A Romantic Journey’, in Romantic Localities, ed. Jacqueline Labbe and Christoph Bode (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 145-156
Platonic Coleridge (London: Legenda, 2009)
‘Zwischen Kantianismus und Schellingianismus: Henry Crabb Robinsons Privatvorlesungen über Philosophie für Madame de Staël 1804 in Weimar’, in Germaine de Staël und ihr erstes deutsches Publikum, ed. Gerhard R. Kaiser and Olaf Müller (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 357-93
Together with Jane Wright (Bristol), he has edited Coleridge’s Afterlives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008)

He has previously taught English Literature and Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, and he is Reviews Editor of the Coleridge Bulletin.