Timothy Whelan, Ph.D. (University of Maryland)

 

Professor of English, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, Senior Visiting Fellow, WhelanDr Williams’s Centre, and General Editor, Crabb Robinson Project


email: twhelangasou@yahoo.com


Timothy Whelan has been teaching Early American Literature since 1989. His early research interests concerned the poetry and prose of the American Puritan, Anne Bradstreet, as well as American religious history. Since 1998, however, his research has focused on British nonconformity (primarily Baptist and Unitarian), 1750-1850, and its intersection with literature and culture. This research has led to articles on such Romantic figures as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Joseph Cottle, George Dyer, William Godwin, and Henry Crabb Robinson, as well as several dissenting writers, such as the political pamphleteer William Fox, radical newspaper editor Benjamin Flower, the prolific Baptist essayist John Foster, and the Baptist minister Robert Hall. His work has also led to recovering the lives and writings (both published and unpublished) of numerous nonconformist women writers and booksellers (mostly Baptist), including Maria de Fleury, Martha Gurney, Mary Lewis, Anne Steele, Mary Steele, Mary Scott, Elizabeth Coltman, and Maria Saffery. The first four volumes of the eight-volume Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (Pickering & Chatto) will appear in 2011. Whelan is the general editor and volume editor for volumes 3-8, presenting all the published and unpublished writings and letters of the literary circle of women in Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Somerset that revolved around Anne and Mary Steele of Broughton. Whelan is also general editor of the Crabb Robinson Project.


His publications include:

  • The Political Writings of William Fox: Abolitionist, Tory, and Friend to the French Revolution, co-edited with John Barrell (Trent Editions, 2011)
  • ‘Coleridge and some Bristol Baptists, 1794-96’, in Wordsworth and Coleridge in the West Country, ed. Nick Roe (Palgrave, 2010)
  • ‘Radical Politics and Unitarian Piety: The Life and Career of Benjamin Flower, 1755-1829’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society 24 (2010), 221-253
  • Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1845 (Baptist History Series, Mercer University Press, 2009)
  • ‘Martha Gurney and William Fox: London Baptists and Radical Politics, 1791-94’, in Pulpit and People: Studies in 18th Century Baptist Life and Thought, ed. John Briggs (Paternoster Press, 2009)
  • ‘William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse of the 1790s’, Eighteenth Century Studies 42 (2009), 397-411
  • Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794-1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008)
  • ‘A Calendar of Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1907’, Baptist Quarterly 42 (2008), 577-612
  • Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1845 (Macon: Baptist History Series, Mercer University Press, 2009)
  • ‘ “For the Hand of a Woman, has Levell’d the Blow”: Maria de Fleury’s Pamphlet War with William Huntington, 1787-1791,’ Women's Studies 36 (2007), 431-54
  • ‘Coleridge, the Morning Post, and a Female ‘Illustrissimae’: An Unpublished Autograph, February 1800,’ European Romantic Review 17 (2006), 21-38