C. SUZANNE MATHESON, B.A. Hons. (McGill), M.A. (Toronto), D.Phil (Oxon), is a specialist in British Romantic literature, visual culture, and history of the book. She has worked extensively on the poetry and design of William Blake, particularly on the intermediation of Blake’s early illuminated books. She is currently writing a social history of public art exhibition in Georgian England and the fraught ‘invention’ of art-viewing audiences in the period. Her ongoing, collaborative work with Alex McKay on the Claude mirror and eighteenth-century optical technology is one application of this research. A recent interdisciplinary project, Tintern Abbey in the Era of Romanticism, carries her interest in spectatorship, theories of the gaze and Romantic visual culture into the appraisal and representation of an iconic landscape site. A related exhibition, Enchanting Ruin: Tintern Abbey and Romantic Tourism in Wales, is installed at the gallery of the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan from Feb. 10th to May 10th, 2008, and online thereafter at htttp://www.lib.umich.edu/spec-coll. An archival/teaching project begun in 2008 with Dr. Heidi Jacobs, Leddy Librarian, University of Windsor called Fugitive Pages: Recovering the Underground Railway in Print, will train students in the methodologies of print culture as they construct a digital archive of regional newspapers associated with the anti-slavery campaign. Matheson teaches courses in Romantic literature, scholarship and bibliography, cultural history and women’s studies. In 2000 she was the recipient of the University of Windsor Alumni Teaching Award.

Matheson has contributed articles to the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, the Times Literary Supplement, and participated in the Courtauld’s exhibition and catalogue Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836. She has held fellowships at the Yale British Art Center, Lewis Walpole Library and Huntington Library, at University College, Oxford and Clare Hall, Cambridge.

She is an Associate Professor and Chair of Graduate Studies in the Department of English, University of Windsor, and a 2008 Windsor Humanities Research Group Fellow.

Her forthcoming book on Tintern Abbey, through the University of Toronto Press, is goes to press some time in 2010.

Link to Enchanting Ruin - University of Michigan website.