Dr Alex Benchimol
- Senior Lecturer in Scottish Romantic Print Culture) (English Literature)
telephone:
01413302695
email:
Alex.Benchimol@glasgow.ac.uk
R309 Level 3, English Literature, 5 University Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QH
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5948-0086Research interests
- Scottish Romanticism
- Radical intellectual culture in the Romantic period
- Scottish periodical history in the long eighteenth century
- Scottish Enlightenment
- Theories of the public sphere & comparative national media
- Eco-criticism
Biography
Dr. Alex Benchimol is Senior Lecturer in Scottish Romantic Print Culture and has been teaching in the School since 2003. Dr. Benchimol is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and is the co-founder, with Dr. Gerard Lee McKeever, of the Scottish Romanticism Research Group (SRRG), which he co-convened with Dr McKeever from 2010-19. Alex is a native of Phoenix, Arizona and was educated at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio where he studied English and History, and holds Masters degrees in Media and Cultural Studies, and English, from the Universities of Glasgow and Toronto, respectively. He completed a doctorate in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow in 2001.
Dr. Benchimol’s primary research interests include Scottish periodical history in the long eighteenth century, Scottish Romanticism, radical Romantic period intellectual culture, the Scottish Enlightenment, theories of the public sphere, and ecological writing (he was co-investigator on an AHRC-funded research network, Values of Environmental Writing in 2010-11). His first monograph charts the contested development of cultural criticism in Britain during the early nineteenth century: Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period: Scottish Whigs, English Radicals and the Making of the British Public Sphere. It has been reviewed in the BARS Bulletin and Review, Romantic Textualities, Scottish Literary Review, The Year’s Work in English Studies, Eighteenth-Century Scotland, the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the European Journal of English Studies.
His research and review essays have been published in journals such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Textual Practice, Romantic Circles Reviews, Romanticism, Thesis Eleven, Radical Philosophy, The BARS Review, The European Legacy and the Romantic Circles Praxis Series.
Alex’s current research explores the development of Scottish civil society, constitutional identity and the national press in the long eighteenth century, including the emergence of a distinctive Scottish public sphere since 1707, reflected in contributions to The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (2011), Studies in Scottish Literature (2013) and in his 2015 essay collection (with Rhona Brown and David Shuttleton) Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015).
In 2018 his essay volume with Gerard McKeever was published, Cultures of Improvement in Scottish Romanticism, 1707-1840, in Routledge’s Enlightenment World series. The research volume, featuring work by leading scholars in Scottish Romantic studies, developed from a SRRG symposium held in 2015 at the University of Glasgow. Alex’s next monograph project, Print, Nation and Improvement: The Scottish Press and Public Sphere, 1707-1801, investigates the interrelated dynamics of national identity, material improvement and civic-based constitutional reform in the eighteenth-century Scottish press and public sphere. Alex has two essays currently in press: one for Scottish Historical Review on discourses of reform in the Glasgow Advertiser (1783-1801) newspaper, and another on the Glasgow Advertiser and Gore’s Liverpool Advertiser for an essay collection on Print Culture, Agency and Regional Identity in the Handpress Era—a key output from his participation in the Print Culture, Agency and Regional Identity research network.
Extending his research on the Scottish press and public sphere into the twenty-first century, Alex has collaborated with Professor Philip Schlesinger of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research on two complementary research programmes funded by awards from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Securing Scotland’s Voice: Strategic Responses to the Digital Media Revolution in the National Press (2013) linked key assessments of the economic, regulatory and political challenges facing the Scottish newspaper press from researchers, journalists, and policymakers within Scotland and the wider UK, while also providing international perspectives on the current state of Scotland’s national media from leading researchers and practitioners representing comparable national media ecologies in Europe and North America. This project resulted in a widely disseminated public policy article for Policy Scotland (2014) and a featured cluster of essays in the journal Media, Culture and Society (2015), which Dr. Benchimol co-edited with Prof. Schlesinger.
In 2016 Dr. Benchimol and Prof. Schlesinger were awarded with another RSE grant to fund a companion research project on the Scottish press and constitutional change, 1707 and 2014: the National Press , Civil Society and Constitutional Identity in Scotland, which initiated a seminar series and research network among historians of the Scottish press, constitutional experts, scholars of the nation’s contemporary media, civil society activists, policymakers and media industry stakeholders. Key outputs from this project included a special issue of the journal Scottish Affairs, co-edited by Dr Benchimol and Prof Schlesinger, published in 2018, as well as a 2017 report on the seminar series for Policy Scotland.
Alex co-organized the 12th Biennial International Conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies: Enlightenment, Romanticism & Nation, and the Before Blackwood's: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment symposium.
Dr. Benchimol has acted as an academic expert for a number of media projects, including for BBC 4’s Lyrical Journey series in 2011, and a 2017 BBC Scotland documentary, The Paper Thistle: 200 Years of the Scotsman. He has also written on the legacy of the founding editor and publisher of the Glasgow Advertiser newspaper for The Herald in 2018.
Grants
Co-I, ‘Values of Environmental Writing’, AHRC Network Grant, 2010-11 (PI: Dr. Hayden Lorimer, Geographical and Earth Sciences; Co-I: Dr. Rhian Williams, English Literature).
PI, ‘Securing Scotland’s Voice: Strategic Responses to the Digital Media Revolution in the National Press’, RSE Arts and Humanities Workshop Grant, 2013 (Co-I: Prof. Philip Schlesinger, Centre for Cultural Policy Research).
PI, ‘1707 and 2014: Civil Society, Constitutional Identity and the National Press in Scotland’, 2016-17 (Co-I: Prof. Philip Schlesinger, Centre for Cultural Policy Research).
Supervision
Dr. Benchimol is particularly interested in supervising postgraduate research on any aspect of Scottish Romanticism, radical intellectual culture of the romantic period, periodical culture of the long eighteenth century, literature and the public sphere, and theoretical approaches to British intellectual and cultural history.
Alex has successfully supervised postgraduate research projects on Improvement and Scottish Romanticism; postcolonial modes of hospitality in Scott's Waverley novels; Ossian and the writing of Scottish history; Blake, Whitman and Transatlantic Romanticism; Brazilian Romanticism; Victorian diaries and life-writing; and radical aesthetics in the Modernist novel. He currently supervises projects on the Eco-monstrous in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy and R. A. Lafferty; and David Foster Wallace and American Pragmatism.
- Lead Supervisor: Freire, Rafael Argenton (2010) Byron and Álvares de Azevedo: Byronism in Brazil. MPhil (R).
- Lead Supervisor: Millim, Anne-Marie (2010) Preaching silence: the disciplined self in the. Victorian diary. PhD.
- Lead Supervisor: Karagouni, Villy (2012) Voices of dissent: Interpenetrations of aesthetics and socio-politics in three modernist case-studies. PhD.
- Co-Supervisor: Chiu, Kang-Yen (2012) Hospitality, nation and empire in Walter Scott's Waverley novels. PhD.
- Lead Supervisor: Davidson, Ryan J. (2014) Affinities of influence: exploring the relationship between Walt Whitman and William Blake. PhD.
- Lead Supervisor: McKeever, Gerard Lee (2014) Enlightened fictions and the romantic nation: aesthetics of improvement in long-eighteenth-century Scottish writing. PhD.
- Lead Supervisor: Fertig, Anne R. (2015) Authentic fictions and aesthetic histories: the problem of the poems of Ossian in the writing of Scottish history, 1760-1814. MPhil (R).
- Thoreson, Jonas Alexander
The Clash of Publics on Red Clydeside: Periodical Print Cultures, Education and Pedagogy, and Public Opinion Formation in the Scottish Public Sphere, c. 1872-1945
Teaching
Dr. Benchimol teaches undergraduate Honours courses in nineteenth and twentieth-century American Literature, Romantic Literature, cultural theory, and ecological writing from the eighteenth century to the present.
He has contributed core teaching to MLitt programmes in Modernities, Victorian Literature and Romanticism at Glasgow. Alex administered the MLitt in Romanticism and the Forms of Modernity from 2003-2008, convened the MLitt in Enlightenment, Romanticism and Nation from 2008-10, and was overall Postgraduate Convener for English Literature from 2008-11. He convened the second year English Literature module in Writing and Ideology (2A) from 2013-16.
Dr. Benchimol was made a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2009.
