Dr. Gavin Sourgen
Assistant Professor of English Literature
MLitt, British Romantic Literature, University of St. Andrews
BA, English and History, University of Witwatersrand
Gavin Sourgen is an expert of British Romanticism and has been a visiting assistant professor of English Literature at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College since 2015, effectively teaching and mentoring students in the classroom, by advising theses, and leading Honors Forum. He completed his PhD on Romantic Aesthetics at Balliol College, Oxford University, where he taught British and Continental Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century. Prior to studying at Oxford, Dr. Sourgen completed a Master’s degree in Literature of the Romantic Period at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and taught as a full-time lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, his country of origin.
Dr. Sourgen’s research falls broadly within the field of British Romanticism but his teaching stretches over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Alexander Pope to Virginia Woolf. The kinds of concepts within the history of ideas that appeal to him relate to the evolution of literary forms and how they connect to broader historical processes. His invited book on Lord Byron’s form consciousness is under review at Oxford University Press, and he is moving onto his next major research project, which examines questions concerning the interrelatedness of forms of power and the power of form during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.
Contact: 561-799-8615; HA 125