Benjamin Morgan

My research and teaching focus on literature, science, and aesthetics in the Victorian period and early twentieth century. My particular areas of interest include nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion; aestheticism and decadence; and speculative and science fiction. I also write about topics in the environmental humanities including extinction, energy cultures, and the literary history of climate change. My approach is oriented by critical traditions in aesthetic theory, affect theory, and science studies.

My first book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2017), explores how nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion generated new and controversial explanations of the human experience of the arts. The book reflects on the long history of using evolutionary theory and cognitive science to make sense of art and literature, and develops some theoretical tools for articulating the unusual physicality of aesthetic experience. I discuss an array of Victorian literature and science writing, including the work of Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee. These writers explored and debated a materialist, broadly anti-Kantian conception of aesthetic experience as an embodied relation between person and artwork.

My current book project, In Human Scale: The Aesthetics of Climate Change, asks how art and literature try to bring long and vast processes of ecological devastation into human frames of reference. One of the imaginative problems we confront in the era of climate change is that although global warming, ocean acidification, and extinction are happening extremely quickly at a geological time scale, these disasters look slow or distant from our human perspective. My project argues that this “scalar disjuncture” originates with British industrialization and earth sciences, and shows how literary and cultural forms like the naturalist novel, utopian literature, the panorama, or decadent aesthetics developed formal strategies for fusing human and inhuman scales of time and space. You can read parts of In Human Scale here and here.