Richard Adelman

Reader in English, Department of English, School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex

Director of Research, Department of English

General Editor, The Yearbook of English Studies

Trustee, Modern Humanities Research Association

Publications:

Monographs:

Doubtful Knowledge: Skepticism and the Birth of Political Economy (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 2026), 266pp.

The Epistemologies of Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025); 64 pp.

Idleness & Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); 233 pp.

Idleness, Contemplation, and the Aesthetic, 1750-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); 203 pp.

Edited Collections:

Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850, ed. with Catherine Packham (New York: Routledge, 2018); 255 pp.

"English Now", Yearbook of English Studies, 55 (2025).

Articles:

“Ruskin & Gothic Literature”, Wordsworth Circle, 48:3 (Summer, 2017): 152-63.

“The ‘Desecrated Mind’ and Its Alternatives: Dante Rossetti & Political Economy”, ELH, 84:1 (Spring 2017): 195-222.

“Ventriloquism & The Scandal of Idleness in J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K”, Textual Practice, 30:4 (July, 2016): 599-620.

“Keats and The Sociability of Idle Contemplation”, Poetica, 82 (January, 2015): 21-38.

“Idleness & Vacancy in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’”, Keats-Shelley Journal, 62 (2013): 62-79 [Winner of the Best Essay Prize for 2013, Keats-Shelley Association of America].

“Idle Thought in Wordsworth’s Lucy Cycle”, Romanticism, 17:1 (April, 2011): 94-105.

Book Chapters:

“The Formation of Political Economy as a Knowledge Practice”, with Catherine Packham, in Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850, eds. Richard Adelman & Catherine Packham (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1-20.

“Idleness and Creativity: Between Neo-Classicism and Romanticism”, in Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, eds. M. Fludernik & M. Nandi (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 174-94.