Email: g.dart@ucl.ac.uk External phone: 020 7679 3139 (Department Tutor) | ![]() |
Education and Experience
Gregory Dart spent his undergraduate and graduate years (from 1986 to 1993) at the University of Cambridge. From 1993 he was a lecturer at the University of York, and has been at UCL since 2000.
His first book, the book of his Ph.D, was a monograph on the influence of the French Revolution on the Romantics, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1999, and paperbacked in 2005.
His teaching range at UCL focuses on the Romantics and Victorians but also includes twentieth-century literature and film, the eighteenth century, and Shakespeare.
Professor Dart has held several administrative posts, including Chair of the Board of Studies and Chair of Examiners. He also supervised and examined a number of PhD theses, both inside and outside UCL.
He is currently Chair of the Hazlitt Society, a member of the Charles Lamb Society, and on the editorial board of The Hazlitt Review.
He has also acted as a reader for the Manchester, Oxford, and Cambridge University Presses, Palgrave Macmillan and Peter Lang.
Research Interests
Gregory Dart’s research, both current and prospective, is centrally concerned with Romanticism, the City, and the history and development of the essay form from Montaigne to the modern period.
The main academic project between 2000 and 2012 was a monograph called Cockney Adventures (Cambridge University Press, 2012) a study of the development of new kinds of metropolitan art and literature in the years 1815-40.
In 2010 Dart edited a collection of essays, Restless Cities, with his colleague Matthew Beaumont. This included essays by Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit, Esther Leslie, Rachel Bowlby, Geoff Dyer, David Trotter, Iain Borden, Kasia Boddy, and Marshall Berman. He is now working on another collection of city essays with the same colleague.
For several years now Dart has been working on three volumes of a new six-volume Collected Edition of the Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, for which he is also General Editor.
This is contracted to be published by Oxford University Press as part of their English Authors series. The three volumes Dart is working on will be Vol. I, Lamb’s Works of 1818, Vol. IV. the Elia essays, and Vol. VI, the Uncollected Prose.
Vol. II, the Dramatic Specimens and Garrick Extracts, will be edited by Gillian Russell, of York University, Volume III, the Works for Children, by Felicity James, and Volume V, the Later Poetry, by Samantha Matthews.
Recent publications include a chapter on Beethoven's Fidelio for Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron's Romanticism and Time (2021), an essay on 'The Romantic Essayists and the City' for Karshan and Phillips's OUP collection On Essays (2020), an essay on 'Practical Criticism for David Duff’s Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (2018), and a chapter on 'Addison and the Romantics' for Paul Davis's upcoming Oxford collection on Addison.
In addition to his literary interests, Dart has also written 16 essays for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, for use in their programmes, DVDs and online.
Books
Metropolitan Art and Literature 1810-1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 297.
Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; pbk. 2005), pp. 302.
Unrequited Love: On Stalking and Being Stalked (London. Short Books, 2003), pp. 160.
Editions
Ed. with Matthew Beaumont, Restless Cities (London: Verso, 2010).
Guest Editor, Re-imagining the City, Special Issue of Romanticism 14:2 (2008)
Ed. with Critical Introduction, William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2008).
Ed. with Critical Introduction, William Hazlitt Metropolitan Essays (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2005).
Articles and Chapters in Books
'Addison and the Romantics' in Paul Davis's in Addison (OUP, 2021), 'Beethoven: Revolutionary Transformations' in Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron eds. Romanticism and Time (2021), 'The Romantic Essayists and the City' in Karshan and Phillips ed. On Essays (OUP,,2020), 'Practical Criticism' in David Duff ed. Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (OUP, 2018), 'Rousseau and the Romantic Essayists', in David Higgins and Russell Goulbourne eds. Rousseau and British Romanticism (Bloomsbury, 2017).
‘Daydreaming’ in Restless Cities, ed. Beaumont and Dart (London: Verso, 2010).
‘A World Within Walls: B.R. Haydon’s Mock Election and Debtors’ Prisons’, in Nigel Leask and Philip Connell (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 214-36.
‘Secret People’, in Philip Horne and Peter Swaab (eds), Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 203-10.
‘Chambers of Horror: De Quincey’s “Postscript” to On Murder’, in Daniel Roberts and Robert Morison (eds), Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 186-210.
Articles in Journals
'Lamb's Edition of 1818', Charles Lamb Bulletin, No. 156 (2012)
‘On Great and Little Things: Cockney Art in the 1820s’, Romanticism 14.2 (2008): 149-167.
‘Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, New Series No. 138 (April 2007): 38-46.
‘The Cockney Moment’, Cambridge Quarterly, XXXII, 3 (September 2003): 203-25.
‘Flash Style: Pierce Egan and the Literary Culture of the 1820s’ History Workshop Journal 51 (Spring 2001): 181-205.
‘Hazlitt and Biography’ Cambridge Quarterly, XXIX, 4 (December 2000): 338-48.
‘Romantic Cockneyism: Hazlitt and the Periodical Press,’ Romanticism, 6.2 (2000): 143-160.
‘The Reworking of Ford Madox Brown’s Work’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27.1 (Spring 1999): 69-95.