Office Location: Victoria College Room 107
E-mail: angela.esterhammer@utoronto.ca
Degrees
BA - English and Literary Studies (Victoria College, University of Toronto)
PhD - Comparative Literature (Princeton)
Professor Angela Esterhammer is the author or editor of 15 books and over 80 articles in the field of British, German and European Romanticism and 19th-century culture, focusing primarily on performativity and performance. Her current research concerns experimental uses of textual, visual, and performative media during the 1820s and investigates the era's preoccupation with personal identity, celebrity, anonymity and pseudonymity. In the course of this research she is working with literary magazines, innovative forms of theatre, and popular fiction, especially the work of the Scottish writer John Galt. Other areas covered in her research and teaching are Romantic poetry (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Hemans, Landon, Hölderlin) and fiction (Scott, Godwin, Kleist, Staël). Professor Esterhammer is a founding member and Executive Committee member of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), founding director of Western University's graduate program in comparative literature (MA and PhD) and the University of Zurich's PhD program in English and American literary studies, and past president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. In addition to being chosen by Northrop Frye to receive the Toronto Arts Awards Foundation Protégé Award, Professor Esterhammer is a past holder of the John H. Moss Scholarship, the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature, the Distinguished University Professorship (Western University), and the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (Germany), and she has been elected to the Academia Europaea, and the Royal Society of Canada.
Selected Publications
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Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
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Editor, Three Short Novels: Glenfell; Andrew of Padua; The Omen, by John Galt. In The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt, general editor Angela Esterhammer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020.
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Co-editor (with Diane Piccitto and Patrick Vincent), Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
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Co-editor (with Alexander J. Dick), Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
- Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Editor, Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Volume 16 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
- Editor, Romantic Poetry. Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002.
- The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism. Stanford University Press, 2000.
- Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake. University of Toronto Press, 1994. 245 pp.