Joel Childers

I teach and write on literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic period, primarily in Britain, and on the overlapping histories of literary criticism, the human sciences, and European colonialism. I am the author of The Historical Poem: On the Lives and Afterlives of Romantic Literary Criticism (Stanford University Press, 2026) as well as essays in New Literary History, Philosophy and Literature, and Modern Philology. Before coming to Willamette, I taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the English Department at Johns Hopkins, where I received my PhD in 2021.