Ivan Ortiz, PhD

Dr. Ortiz is completing his book, Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Modern Transport: 1784-1850, which reexamines the fraught relationship that Romantic writers and artists had with emerging technologies of locomotion, like steam navigation, the air balloon, the mail coach, and the railway. Resisting the claim that Romantic writers exhibited a universal technophobia, his research uncovers the surprising contributions these modern vehicles made to thinking about specific poetic and aesthetic categories, like fancy, sublimity, and nostalgia.

His new research projects are invested in exploring strong connections between Romanticism and contemporary cultures of aesthetics, media, and politics. These projects include thinking about social media cultures in Jane Austen’s fiction, Greta Thunberg’s activism in terms of Romantic childhood, and contemporary site-specific art shows and their echoes of Romantic picturesque cultures. His publications have appeared or are forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in the Novel, and Romantic Circles Praxis.

Recent Publications:

• “Bursting Golden Bubbles: Thomas De Quincey’s California.” European Romantic Review 28.3 (2017): 395-403.

• “Fancy’s Eye: Poetic Vision in Romantic Balloon Writings.” Studies in Romanticism 56.2 (2017): 253-284.

• “Nostalgia and Trauma in De Quincey’s The English Mail-Coach.” Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Lisa Kasmer (Routledge, 2017): 34-55.

• “Lyric Possession in the Abolition Ballad.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51.2 (2018).

• “Selfies with Emma: Jane Austen’s Social Media.” Studies in the Novel 54.2 (2022).

• “Listening for Noise in Antislavery Poetry.” Forthcoming in “Romantic Anti-Slavery in the Era of Black Lives Matter: Pedagogies and Contexts” Romantic Circles Praxis (2024).