I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter, I was awarded a starred first, two commended distinctions at master’s level, and a doctorate during which I was an Huntington Fellow. I have recently finished my first monograph, Shelley's Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song, published July 2021, and assist Nora Crook with volume 8 of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Johns Hopkins University Press). I am editing The Cyclops and 'Hymn to Mercury.' With Nora Crook and Anna Mercer, I am preparing an edition of the Shelley notebook at the Library of Congress (MSS. 13, 290). I was awarded a Carl H. Pforzheimer Jr., Research Grant by the Keats-Shelley Society of America in 2021, and in 2022 I will take up a one month Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

I am working on a two-part documentary about Shelley's life and afterlives commissioned by BBC Radio 4.  

Specialisms

• The poetry, thought, reception history, and editing of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
• Romanticism and Victorian Studies.
• Verse culture and prosody 1700-1950.
• I am a patron of (and a sceptic about) the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, add science.
• Textual scholarship and its history.
• The history of scholarship and disciplinarity. 
• The history of literary criticism and theory, especially its cliques and schools, fads and fashions.
• Radical Conservatisms and Narratives of Cultural Decline.

Research Project

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship: Amateurs and Professionals: The Reception History of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1851-1922).

As we approach the bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s drowning, his work seems as timely as in the years between the death of his first editor (Mary Shelley) and his first centenary. During this period (1851-1922), Shelley was canonised in the anglophone world, Europe and even the Far East. Streets were named after him. My British Academy project examines the phenomenon of 'High Shelleyanism', the international cast of Shelleyans, Shelleyites, and also Shelleyphobes. I am studying the differing ideologies and methodologies of the poet's numerous editors, amateur and professional. But the project aims beyond textual scholarship and colourful competing personalities. It will chart the diffusion of Shelley’s works and life through biography, cheap reprints, illustration, music and networks of influence.

Since joining Newcastle in November 2020, I have lectured and taught on the following modules:

SEL1030 : Close Reading

SEL2203 : Revolutionary Britain, 1789-1832

• Coffey B. Shelley's Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021.
• Coffey B. Romanticism and the Polymath. The Wordsworth Circle 2021. In Press.
• Coffey B. Percy Bysshe Shelley and China’s Gayest Art. The Wordsworth Circle 2020, 51(2), 221-241.
• Coffey B. Shelley’s Poetry of Air. The Wordsworth Circle 2019, 50(2), 219–236.
• Coffey B. ‘Wrecked in that Convulsion’: Epipsychidion and Rhyme. The Keats-Shelley Review 2019, 33(1), 71-80.
• Coffey B. Shelley’s Kant, Wordsworth, and Peter Bell. The Wordsworth Circle 2018, 49(3). Submitted.
• Coffey B. Shelley’s Alastor and “On a Future State”. The Wordsworth Circle 2017, 48(1).
• Coffey B, Crook N, Mercer A. The Frankenstein Review Shelley Notebook. A Facsimile and Diplomatic Transcription of MS. 13, 290. 2023. University of Bucknell Press. In Preparation.
• Coffey B. 'And So Modify': Shelleyan Receptions. In: Dialogues and Receptions: BARS Digital Events. 2021, BARS (Online).
• Coffey B. Shelley200: Epipsychidion Roundtable. In: Shelley200: Epipsychidion Roundtable. 2021, Digital.
• Coffey B. Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence: New Relations by Michael O'Neill [Book review]. Essays in Criticism 2020, 70(3), 382-390.
• Coffey B. John Worthen, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley [Book review]. The Wordsworth Circle 2019, 50(4), 449-454.